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

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  • 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?

  • 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.

    It's not actually a very fun game to play, reading the lore or watching a video of someone else play is sufficient.

  • "Piracy" isn't piracy.

    It depends. Pirating a specific thing created by someone I think is not good. Ask almost any creator on the Web.

    While using motives, aesthetics, characters, universes ... is usually something that shouldn't be subject to IP law, but in fact is, because the law is not written with any creators in mind, it's intended to create convenient conditions for big businesses.

  • It depends. Pirating a specific thing created by someone I think is not good. Ask almost any creator on the Web.

    While using motives, aesthetics, characters, universes ... is usually something that shouldn't be subject to IP law, but in fact is, because the law is not written with any creators in mind, it's intended to create convenient conditions for big businesses.

    It depends.

    It doesn't 🙂

    Piracy is a sea ship attack. "Unauthorized copying" is the term you seek. Copying doesn't involve attacks, killing, or even robbing, but piracy -- does. And no, it isn't just some terminology casus. Law strictly differentiate killing, raping, robbing and unauthorized copying.

    No, I don't talk stupid shit. It is important.

  • It depends.

    It doesn't 🙂

    Piracy is a sea ship attack. "Unauthorized copying" is the term you seek. Copying doesn't involve attacks, killing, or even robbing, but piracy -- does. And no, it isn't just some terminology casus. Law strictly differentiate killing, raping, robbing and unauthorized copying.

    No, I don't talk stupid shit. It is important.

    It's important propaganda-wise, because it supports a subconscious association between unauthorized copy and and capturing a vessel with its crew. I agree.

    What I meant is - unauthorized copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery. There are people, not living very rich, who depend on it happening more rarely. Of course they are being robbed by intermediaries always and by us sometimes, but they still feel it.

  • It's important propaganda-wise, because it supports a subconscious association between unauthorized copy and and capturing a vessel with its crew. I agree.

    What I meant is - unauthorized copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery. There are people, not living very rich, who depend on it happening more rarely. Of course they are being robbed by intermediaries always and by us sometimes, but they still feel it.

    It’s important propaganda-wise, because

    Exactly

    copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery

    Never. Robbery involves violence plus moving something of value from the victim to the robber. Your moral compass is broken already by the propaganda you mentioned earlier.

    You may think that copying is "bad" in some cases but it never "armed violent values extortion" bad. Never.

  • 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.

    Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?

  • 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.

    Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder. Something tells me this one wont tolerate if the og creator posts anything and they may know enough background canon to know its them.

    A real irony to the plot of the game is that the business partner wanted to reign in the freedom of the creators. Not impossible they deemed it to political.

    I am not sure about those games you mentioning but its possible they are tolerated because a combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal) and not wanting it to gain any more publicity. Disney did the same thing ignoring Micky mouse porn.

  • Remember when stealing on sea was piracy? Always has been.

    Copyright infringement is different.

    Yes. Piracy in the sense of stealing from ships in international waters is different from piracy in the sense of copyright infringement. Thanks for that.

  • No problem, how much is "everything" in USD?

  • It’s important propaganda-wise, because

    Exactly

    copying is sometimes too morally very similar to a robbery

    Never. Robbery involves violence plus moving something of value from the victim to the robber. Your moral compass is broken already by the propaganda you mentioned earlier.

    You may think that copying is "bad" in some cases but it never "armed violent values extortion" bad. Never.

    I agree. I had a "pleasure" to experience the difference.

    That also involved learning that human society consists of apes, real danger is always very close and no police will help you against it, thus right to carry arms is paramount. Preferably allowing you to kill a tank.

  • Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder. Something tells me this one wont tolerate if the og creator posts anything and they may know enough background canon to know its them.

    A real irony to the plot of the game is that the business partner wanted to reign in the freedom of the creators. Not impossible they deemed it to political.

    I am not sure about those games you mentioning but its possible they are tolerated because a combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal) and not wanting it to gain any more publicity. Disney did the same thing ignoring Micky mouse porn.

    Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder.

    Should fix that in law, based on the commonality of such use.

    IP companies use every such opening, we should too.

    combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal)

    Except they even use character names from HP.

    Publicity - maybe, would be funny.

  • Fanfiction and non monetised use is not at all exempt from these laws but rather tolerated by the copyright holder.

    Should fix that in law, based on the commonality of such use.

    IP companies use every such opening, we should too.

    combination of plausible deniability (wizard uk boarding school isnt that orginal)

    Except they even use character names from HP.

    Publicity - maybe, would be funny.

    I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

    In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

    Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.

    Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don't think that justifies the damage it does.

  • Yes. Piracy in the sense of stealing from ships in international waters is different from piracy in the sense of copyright infringement. Thanks for that.

    I didn't mean to suggest that. I consider calling copyright infringement "piracy" to be propaganda started by the music industry to push their monetary interests. A derogatory term that conflates it with immoral stealing (and murder). This overstates any harms caused.

  • I would personally argue that fixing the law means getting rid of the notion of intellectual property all together.

    In my own reasoning someone copying me is the highest form of flattery and i would still have an edge understanding the properties of own idea better then the copycat does.

    Its a huge limiter on human progress and absolutely non sensical in situations where multiple people just happen to have a similar idea. As it stands now an employee could invent the cure to cancer, the employer claiming it and then putting it in a vault to never use and bar anyone from creating it.

    Naturally such idea of abolishing copyright receives lots of criticism from many people because we would have to solve other problems that copyright now aims to fix but i don't think that justifies the damage it does.

    While in capitalism we'll always have ip, copyright, what have you.

    Gotta "protect" capital

  • A copy is not theft.

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

    Exactly

    Profiting off the copied content makes it theft

  • Are you saying that the mere action of scraping is fair use, or that absolutely anything you do with the data you scrape is also fair use?

    I'd say that scraping as a verb implies an element of intent. It's about compiling information about a body of work, not simply making a copy, and therefore if you can accurately call it "scraping" then it's always fair use. (Accuse me of "No True Scotsman" if you would like.)

    But since it involves making a copy (even if only a temporary one) of licensed material, there's the potential that you're doing one thing with that copy which is fair use, and another thing with the copy that isn't fair use.

    Take archive.org for example:

    It doesn't only contain information about the work, but also a copy (or copies, plural) of the work itself. You could argue (and many have) that archive.org only claims to be about preserving an accurate history of a piece of content, but functionally mostly serves as a way to distribute unlicensed copies of that content.

    I don't personally think that's a justified accusation, because I think they do everything in their power to be as fair as possible, and there's a massive public benefit to having a service like this. But it does illustrate how you could easily have a scenario where the stated purpose is fair use but the actual implementation is not, and the infringing material was "scraped" in the first place.

    But in the case of gen AI, I think it's pretty clear that the residual data from the source content is much closer to a linguistic analysis than to an internet archive. So it's firmly in the fair use category, in my opinion.

    Edit: And to be clear, when I say it's fair use, I only mean in the strict sense of following copyright law. I don't mean that it is (or should be) clear of all other legal considerations.

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    (Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism) I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you. People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended). ...what? What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation. People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies. Please allow me to reiterate: ...what? Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps. That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics. I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want. Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how: LOL no. Also, do you remember when I said this? ‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?' Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.