[Glyptodon]

Should you pay royalties if someone says to you "remember that scene from Blade Runner" or "imagine if Jean Luc Picard beamed into the middle of a Batman movie" and visualize something similar to something highly similar to a movie or TV show you've seen?

[stubish]

Copyright law does not apply to imaginary reproductions, such as your imagination. Your question becomes more interesting if get someone to draw that scene from Blade Runner. At that point, it comes down to if a judge considers the derivative work transformative enough (for hand drawn sketch, it would be, except maybe if drawn by a savant). And in the Batman case, you might violate trademark law depending on what you did with image after you drew it, which is a whole other set of rules.

When was the last time you heard the original Happy Birthday song sung on TV? It is now generally avoided, because producers don't want to pay royalties to the copyright holders.

[Glyptodon]

We should assume that at some point we'll be able extract imaginary and remembered images and sequences from neural activity - I think very poor/crude versions exist already.

[kingkawn]

If they’re making money producing images of IP then…

[sjfjsjdjwvwvc]

Who was making any money in this instance? I’m not super familiar with midjourney but it looks to me like he used the free version

[Glyptodon]

Even if it's the paid version, the prompter had it make the infringing content for their own use. And it's only going to be anything more than equivalent to someone making their own sketch of Batman if the prompter reproduces and distributes. It's not like it's illegal for you to tell your artist friend to sketch a Batman either - Comic Cons and such are full of that.

[felipeerias]

Midjourney is returning copies of copyrighted works while its Terms of Service state that “You own all Assets You create with the Services”.

[sjfjsjdjwvwvc]

So you need a legal process to determine if that generation was actually infringing on copyright. IANAL so I have no idea really, and I think most of the other commenters here can’t say for sure either.

[Glyptodon]

So if someone sketches Batman do you sue Bic?

[stubish]

If Bic made a pen that came preloaded with unlicenced images of Batman and guided you to reproduce them, then yes.

[kingkawn]

Are they producing batman on an industrial scale to generate profits/market share that investors value?

[jdiff]

Prompters aren't artists, and neither are image generators. The corporations that create these generators are responsible for the content they illicitly fed into them that they are now spewing out.

If you sell me an endless coloring book that occasionally spits out copyrighted content, that's on you.

[motoxpro]

Of course not because you PAID to see it in the first place. Or you watched it with someone who paid. Or you saw it on a website that was free and THEY paid for it. If you never saw it, you would have no idea what it looked like.

You had to see it at some point, the way in which you see it is the issue, not the memory of it.

If you're arguing that the AI is just like a random human browsing the web and they happened upon these things and now they are allowed to sell those things back to me. Man that seems like so uncompelling of an argument to me.

We're not allowed to do this in any other context. I can't learn music and go tour, take requests from the audience, and act like it is mine. No credit or anything. Sure on a small scale, and there are times when it's unclear, but I can't go to Wembly without paying the original owner when someone asks me to play "Thriller by Michael Jackson"

[Glyptodon]

I'm pretty sure plenty of people have seen Batman without paying. Cartoons were just broadcast over the air - advertisers paid I guess. But also if your friend had a video or DVD, or you checked out a comic from the library, or many of dozens of similar situations. Similarly, comic cons are full of people drawing endless numbers of superheros they have no rights to. Hiring an AI is not buying back copyrighted works, it's buying trained experience and having it produce output for you, IE work for hire, like you might get out of a comic book artist. And it's on the hiring party. If there's no sin in a human artist being able to draw batman because they've seen or trained enough, why is it a sin for AI?

[motoxpro]

I feel like I responded to all of these arguments in my original comment but:

1. The TV station paid for the cartoons and monetized them through advertising

2. As I said, your friend paid for the DVD, The library paid for the comic, etc. SOMEONE is paying or else the original maker would not be able to sustain making the thing. I can't think of one scenario where you consume media where someone didn't pay for it downstream.

3. A comic book artist creating comics inspired by batman, but not a comic OF batman. Again, as I already pointed out, on a small scale this happens all the time, it's just not word DC sueing a guy on the street doing one painting a day.

If the argument is you should be able to pirate or everything should be free, all good, no judgement, but that's not how it works in the world right now.

It IS a sin for a human to get a batman plushie made and sell it. That's my point. That's what MidJourney is doing when they charge $10 a month to make batman photos.

No manufacturing company in the USA let's you do this, that's why you have to go to China to make Nike knockoffs