[felipeerias]

They know exactly what they are doing:

“If You knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find You and collect that money from You. We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make You pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.”

https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/terms-of-service

[nsagent]

That seems like a tenuous defense at best. If your prompt references copyrighted material and Midjourney generates a copyrighted image as a result, it's clear the training data must have contained that work, and whatever filters they have didn't stop them from serving it to you. I can't imagine a court siding with Midjourney in that case.

[joe_the_user]

Wow,

If some site that the allowed anyone to upload and download anything put that as their TOS, would they be absolved of copyright liability also?

It raises fine-grained questions. Is Midjourney generating/offering a copyrighted image the violation or is the user downloading it the violation?

"Your honor, I blame the users/meddling kids"

[pylua]

Seems like you could easily add a couple of adjectives / adverbs to make a completely new scene from the movie and it may be considered fair use?

[cycomanic]

It's amazing to read what people think is fair use. Have a read of the wikpedia article, it's definitely not as straight forward as adding a slight variation and then I'm good.

If that was the case all of the following would be fair use (hint they typically are not).

- making a movie from a book (I mean it's a pretty big variation) - making a sequel/prequel to a book, movie using the characters of the book - making new comic stories using Mickey Mouse/Batman/Superman... - Making merchandise using redrawn characters from comic books... ...

Also it's important to note that one of the important aspects to judge fair use is commercial interest, i.e. what is allowed for an individual privately, might very well be copyright infringement for a company (like Midjourney) who sells a commercial product.

[pylua]

I am looking at it from the perspective of someone using mid journey to generate the image, not the company itself.

What if I want to use midjourney to reimagine a new scene between to scenes to prove whatever social issue I want to blog about. I then post the blog with the image.

Would there be a difference if I hand drew it? Is me describing the movie in the context of my social issue considered copyright infringement because it is a compressed memory?

[felipeerias]

Would it, really? And would you own that new scene?

Midjourney is a paid service which uses copyrighted works as source, without any agreement with the copyright holders, while declaring that its users own all the assets that it creates for them.

[pylua]

I am not a lawyer but adding your own items and creating a hypothetical scenes seems more like fair use than the reaction videos on youtube do? Or, is that a different ballgame altogether?

Curious to find out. I am not a lawyer.

[edgyquant]

Let’s see how well this works out for them. Sounds like trying to pull the “we’re just a platform card”