[passwordoops]

The image generator that provided the screenshot without licensing/permission.

This isn't complicated, we have laws on the books, and I hope legislators learned their lesson after the "Uber's not a taxi company, and AirBNBs are not like hotels"

[usrbinbash]

> The image generator

So if someone makes a forgery of, say, a picasso, who do we blame: The forger or the brush?

> This isn't complicated

This concerns copyright law, which is handled case by case, and deals with very fuzzy definitions like "fair use" or what constitutes "transformative works", and things like "impact in the marketplace".

So yes, this is a very complicated topic.

[wrsh07]

The existence of the forgery isn't the problem!! Selling the forged painting _as if it's the real one_ is the problem (am I missing something?)

In _Tim's Vermeer_ he perfectly (too perfectly) forges a Vermeer. That isn't illegal!! He has it hanging in his home, and whoever is so lucky to inherit it will get to keep it for themselves too.

But if he did it again and then tried to sell it as an original Vermeer - that would be illegal!

[fallingknife]

If I go to Google and ask for screenshots from a movie, it will also produce copyrighted material. So you're right that it isn't complicated. Tools with the same capability already exist and are perfectly legal, and therefore, so is Midjourney.

[passwordoops]

Does Google claim the image is it's own? No. Does Google include a message that the image is copyrighted? Yes.

Does MidJourney attribute the source of the image? No. Does MidJourney's owners claim the requested image is an original generated by their black box correlation machine? Yes.

That's the infringement. Period.

[tedunangst]

Do midjourney's owners claim everything coming out of the black box is an original image?

[wrsh07]

At least one court said you can't copyright generated images, and so I don't think midjourney is exactly claiming it as its own

In fact, they acknowledge that copyrighted material can be created.

[Auracle]

Eh, more: That’s infringement. Question mark?

The images aren’t exact copies, though they’re obviously really close. Considering those are all famous stills from the movies I kind of doubt they actually just took random scenes from the movies themselves - instead it was trained on just images from the internet.

Point A means it might be transformative enough. Point B means it possibly wasn’t deliberately trained on copyrighted material, though obviously they know stuff would be in there. Further, no court has decided whether or not that’d be illegal anyways. My money is on that it won’t be, because there’s really no legal argument that it should be.

If a painter trains himself on copyrighted stuff he’s certainly allowed to sell his own paintings, even if they’re incredibly close to his training material.

[pylua]

That doesn't look like a screenshot from the movie. It looks like a hypothetical screenshot at different angles.

[Glyptodon]

I don't know. This sort of thing will lead to stuff like recording your own memories requiring a licensing fee if not careful. I also think there's a reasonable argument that the prompter is the one creating infringement.

[passwordoops]

Wow. You really do need to walk me down the path you took from a correlation black box machine breaking obvious copyright laws and recording memories

[Glyptodon]

If someone says "imagine batman on a boat" am I not prompting what's essentially my own internal generative AI that's been trained on seeing copyrighted content at some point? If someone says "remember that scene in..." isn't that a form of recovering a copyrighted sequence from your own "trained" memories? Once there's a better ability to extract data from someone's neural activity, remembering or imagining will just be another form of prompting.