Skip to content

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

Technology
68 40 118
  • Yes, that’s a good addition.

    Overall, my point was not that scraping is a universal moral good, but that legislating tighter boundaries for scraping in an effort to curb AI abuses is a bad approach.

    We have better tools to combat this, and placing new limits on scraping will do collateral damage that we should not accept.

    And at the very least, the portfolio value of Disney’s IP holdings should not be the motivating force behind AI regulation.

    Tbh, this is not a question about scraping at all.

    Scraping is just a rather neutral tool that can be used for all sorts of purposes, legal and illegal.

    Neither does the technique justify the purpose nor does outlawing the technique fix the actual problem.

    Fair use only applies for a certain set of use cases and has a strict set of restrictions applied to it.

    The permitted use cases are: "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research".

    And the two relevant restrictions are:

    • "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;"
    • "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

    (Quoted from 17 U.S.C. § 107)

    And here the differences between archive.org and AI become obvious. While archive.org can be abused as some kind of file sharing system or to circumvent paywalls or ads, its intended purpose is for research, and it's firmly non-profit and doesn't compete with copyright holders.

    AI, on the other hand, is almost always commercial, and its main purpose is to replace human labour, specifically of the copyright owners. It might not be an actual problem for Disney's bottom line, but it's a massive problem for smaller artists, stock photographers, translators, and many other professions.

    That way, it clearly doesn't apply to the use cases for fair use while violating the restrictions.

    And for that, it doesn't matter if the training data is acquired using scraping (without permission) or some other way (without permission to use it for AI training).

  • 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.

    You did not read your source. Some quotes you apparently missed:

    Scraping to violate the public’s privacy is bad, actually.

    Scraping to alienate creative workers’ labor is bad, actually.

    Please read your source before posting it and claiming it says something it doesn't actually say.

    Now why does Doctrow distinguish between good scraping and bad scraping, and even between good LLM training and bad LLM training in his post?

    Because the good applications are actually covered by fair use while the bad parts aren't.

    Because fair use isn't actually about what is done (scraping, LLM training, ...) but about who does it (researchers, non-profit vs. companies, for-profit) and for what purpose (research, critique, teaching, news reporting vs. making a profit by putting original copyright owners out of work).

    That's the whole point of fair use. It's even in the name. It's about the use, and the use needs to be fair. It's not called "Allowed techniques, don't care if it's fair".

    • 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.

    Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.

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

    Many times these keys are obtained illegitimately and they end up being refunded. In other cases the key is bought from another region so the devs do get some money, but far less than they would from a regular purchase.

    I'm not sure exactly how the illegitimate keys are obtained, though. Maybe in trying to not pay the publisher you end up rewarding someone who steals peoples' credit cards or something.

  • 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.

    Midjourney isn't opensource, I can't run it on my PC, contrary to stable diffusion.

  • 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?

    Yes, your fan art infringed on Blizzards copyright. Blizzard lets it slide, because there's nothing to gain from it apart from a massive PR desaster.

    Now if you sold your Arthas images on a large enough scale then Blizzard will clearly come after you. Copyright is not only about the damages occured by people not buying Blizzards stuff, but also the license fees they didn't get from you.

    That's the real big difference: if Midjourney was a little hobby project of some guy in his basement that never saw the the light of day, there wouldn't be a problem. But Midjourney is a for-profit tool with the express purpose of allowing people to make images without paying an artist and the way it does that is by using copyrighted works to do so.

  • 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.

    Oh that's unfortunate. Well I don't mind not supporting people like that so I'll give it a go

    • 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.

    Bite each others dicks off

  • Stupid lawsuit because anyone can do Ai now.

    that's a shit take.

    anyone can do AI now, but everyone can't profit from it like they can. that's why the lawsuit.

  • 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.

    intellectual property is grotesque.

    under no circumstances a creator should be barred from his creation.

    if shit like that happens I'd rather there not be any intellectual property at all

  • best Head Shop Online

    Technology technology
    1
    1
    0 Stimmen
    1 Beiträge
    5 Aufrufe
    Niemand hat geantwortet
  • New Orleans debates real-time facial recognition legislation

    Technology technology
    12
    1
    150 Stimmen
    12 Beiträge
    49 Aufrufe
    A
    [image: 62e40d75-1358-46a4-a7a5-1f08c6afe4dc.jpeg] Palantir had a contract with New Orleans starting around ~2012 to create their predictive policing tech that scans surveillance cameras for very vague details and still misidentifies people. It's very similar to Lavender, the tech they use to identify members of Hamas and attack with drones. This results in misidentified targets ~10% of the time, according to the IDF (likely it's a much higher misidentification rate than 10%). Palantir picked Louisiana over somewhere like San Francisco bc they knew it would be a lot easier to violate rights and privacy here and get away with it. Whatever they decide in New Orleans on Thursday during this Council meeting that nobody cares about, will likely be the first of its kind on the books legal basis to track civilians in the U.S. and allow the federal government to take control over that ability whenever they want. This could also set a precedent for use in other states. Guess who's running the entire country right now, and just gave high ranking army contracts to Palantir employees for "no reason" while they are also receiving a multimillion dollar federal contract to create an insane database on every American and giant data centers are being built all across the country.
  • 136 Stimmen
    29 Beiträge
    97 Aufrufe
    J
    Yeah, I was going to say that TV wasn't much of a news source to begin with. The real issue is that social media for news is probably worse - now everyone can be spoonfed the news they want.
  • 817 Stimmen
    41 Beiträge
    24 Aufrufe
    C
    And then price us out
  • signal blogpost on windows recall

    Technology technology
    5
    1
    69 Stimmen
    5 Beiträge
    22 Aufrufe
    P
    I wouldn't trust windows to follow their don't screenshot API, whether out of ignorance or malice.
  • 5 Stimmen
    10 Beiträge
    34 Aufrufe
    S
    You could look into automatic local caching for diles you're planning to seed, and stick that on an SSD. That way you don't hammer the HDDs in the NAS and still get the good feels of seeding. Then automatically delete files once they get to a certain seed rate or something and you're golden. How aggressive you go with this depends on your actual use case. Are you actually editing raw footage over the network while multiple other clients are streaming other stuff? Or are you just interested in having it be capable? What's the budget? But that sounds complicated. I'd personally rather just DIY it, that way you can put an SSD in there for cache and you get most of the benefits with a lot less cost, and you should be able to respond to issues with minimal changes (i.e. add more RAM or another caching drive).
  • 873 Stimmen
    107 Beiträge
    115 Aufrufe
    softestsapphic@lemmy.worldS
    How are they going to make money off of these projects if people can legally copy and redistribute them for free? The same reasons everyone doesn't already do this via pirating. You mean copy, not steal. When something is stolen from you, you no longer have it. Wow you are just a troll, thanks for showing me so I don't waste anymore time with you.
  • CrowdStrike Announces Layoffs Affecting 500 Employees

    Technology technology
    8
    1
    242 Stimmen
    8 Beiträge
    32 Aufrufe
    S
    This is where the magic of near meaningless corpo-babble comes in. The layoffs are part of a plan to aspirationally acheive the goal of $10b revenue by EoY 2025. What they are actually doing is a significant restructuring of the company, refocusing by outside hiring some amount of new people to lead or be a part of departments or positions that haven't existed before, or are being refocused to other priorities... ... But this process also involves laying off 500 of the 'least productive' or 'least mission critical' employees. So, technically, they can, and are, arguing that their new organizational paradigm will be so succesful that it actually will result in increased revenue, not just lower expenses. Generally corpos call this something like 'right-sizing' or 'refocusing' or something like that. ... But of course... anyone with any actual experience with working at a place that does this... will tell you roughly this is what happens: Turns out all those 'grunts' you let go of, well they actually do a lot more work in a bunch of weird, esoteric, bandaid solutions to keep everything going, than upper management was aware of... because middle management doesn't acknowledge or often even understand that that work was being done, because they are generally self-aggrandizing narcissist petty tyrants who spend more time in meetings fluffing themselves up than actually doing any useful management. Then, also, you are now bringing on new, outside people who look great on paper, to lead new or modified apartments... but they of course also do not have any institutional knowledge, as they are new. So now, you have a whole bunch of undocumented work that was being done, processes which were being followed... which is no longer being done, which is not documented.... and the new guys, even if they have the best intentions, now have to spend a quarter or two or three figuring out just exactly how much pre-existing middle management has been bullshitting about, figuring out just how much things do not actually function as they ssid it did... So now your efficiency improving restructuring is actually a chaotic mess. ... Now, this 'right sizing' is not always apocalyptically extremely bad, but it is also essentially never totally free from hiccups... and it increases stress, workload, and tensions between basically everyone at the company, to some extent. Here's Forbes explanation of this phenomenon, if you prefer an explanation of right sizing in corpospeak: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/rightsizing/