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“Piracy is Piracy” – Disney and Universal team up to sue Midjourney

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  • Do you mean play disco Elysium or is there some drama associated with it?

    You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn't go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.

  • I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?

    Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.

    Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it's free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.

  • Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.

    Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it's free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.

    Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.

    I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.

    It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?

  • requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    good luck proving and putting an accurate number to that perceived 'damage'?

    Easy, ten gajillion dollars. Payable in stock.

    • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
    • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
    • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    Removes sunglasses ..."Let them fight"

  • You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn't go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.

    Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

    • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
    • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
    • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    The worst person you know just made a great point

  • A copy is not theft.

    Intellectual property is thought monopoly. See Disco Elysium for a particularly sad case of it.

    But it would be a copyright infringement.

  • Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.

    I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.

    It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?

    I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol

    • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
    • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
    • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    Too big to fail!

  • I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol

    Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.

    But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.

    • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
    • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
    • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    I say this as a massive AI critic: Disney does not have a legitimate grievance here.

    AI training data is scraping. Scraping is — and must continue to be — fair use. As Cory Doctorow (fellow AI critic) says: Scraping against the wishes of the scraped is good, actually.

    I want generative AI firms to get taken down. But I want them to be taken down for the right reasons.

    Their products are toxic to communication and collaboration.

    They are the embodiment of a pathology that sees humanity — what they might call inefficiency, disagreement, incoherence, emotionality, bias, chaos, disobedience — as a problem, and technology as the answer.

    Dismantle them on the basis of what their poison does to public discourse, shared knowledge, connection to each other, mental well-being, fair competition, privacy, labor dignity, and personal identity.

    Not because they didn’t pay the fucking Mickey Mouse toll.

  • Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.

    But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.

    As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that
    The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.

    As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.

    Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.

  • As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that
    The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.

    As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.

    Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.

    Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

    The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

    But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

  • Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

    The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

    But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

    Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie

  • Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie

    Yeah I guess that’s what they’ll have to prove to win this.

  • Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

    You mean cause a chargeback or something? You'd have to find a sufficiently shady seller, the key might get revoked, also you're supporting another ilk of scumbags.

    • Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
    • The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
    • The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

    Oh so when Big companies do it, it's OK. But it's stealing when an OpenSource AI gives that same power back to the people.

  • Drama. A business partner of the creators used an illegal loophole to obtain a majority stake of the company and then fired the actual creators because they where considered to volatile.

    The universe of Disco Elysium is Kurvitz paracosm which he has been creating since his teens. Its a part of their identity that they are now barred from expressing.

    Its a bit like if you told Tolkien halfway trough writing lotr that he is fired as the author and can never write anything about middle earth again.

    It's quite illustrative of DE's universe's relevance to our world though.

    (I'm more partial to SW KotORII: TSL, even if DE feels more like my life, even I wonder if Harry's ex is too not just a blindingly bright and quite f-ckable picture, but also a murderer ; too autistic to look for authors' contacts to ask them about it.)

    Barred from expressing with monetizing it, you certainly mean? Otherwise most of fan fiction would have to be censored, having IP owners not willing competition.

    And even then it's in question, there are plenty of crowdfunded and later paid for indie games set in Harry Potter universe. Those I'm thinking about are NSFW though.

  • Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

    How so? Isn't it the same for the financial purposes?

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    But but we need to power our virtual idiot with more energy than entire countries use :((
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    Yeah this thread ended up being more hostile to regular Americans than I intended but US culture and US global hegemony are the things that attract and amplify the shitty people from around the world. USA is the final boss of capitalist imperialism and the people have completely lost control over the reins. It's now a matter of when they actually say enough is enough, be it now or after Fascism runs its course and hurts millions of others around the world as well.
  • Russia frees REvil hackers after sentencing

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    What makes even more sense is that they now might be secretly forced to hack for the government in exchange for bread and water and staying out of prison.
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    Just keep in mind they are considered a crime in the US and can be located. Use with caution.
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    I'm not afraid of that at all. But if you draw shit tons of power from a crappy socket, things start to heat up real quick. Like getting really fucking hot, as in burn your house down hot.
  • Tech Company Recruiters Sidestep Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

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    "Hey ChatGPT, pretend to be an immigration attorney named Soo Park and answer these questions as if you're a criminal dipshit."
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    It was very boring.
  • Microsoft's AI Secretly Copying All Your Private Messages

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    Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation. Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process. Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition. Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot. Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine. Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image. Telemetry refers to data collecting functionality. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad since it can, for example, help reveal and resolve bugs and usability problems, but it is easily (and has often been) abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is an advisable precaution. MS = Microsoft OSS = Open Source Software Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, file system and settings access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control. Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing and/or virtualizing just the resources they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge there is no one-to-one equivalent for Windows. Obviously, many of these concepts relate to IT work, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple enough for the average user if you just pick one of the premade playbooks. (The Atlas playbook is popular among gamers, for example.) Edit: added explanations for docker and telemetry