| > Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part. (Emphasis mine) While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area. > You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. From what I understood, it's mostly allowed for homage and (un)intentional narrowing of creative landscape. Not for ripping people off. > For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney. But all are done in tradition of cross-pollination, there was no ill-intentions, until now. After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred. It's not my interpretation, either [0] [1]. Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at [2]. So things are not as clear cut as before, because a company stepped on the toes of another one. Small fish might get some benefits as a side-effect. Addenda: Even OpenAI power-walked away from mocking Studio Ghibli to "maybe we shouldn't do that" [3]. [0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/opena... [1]: https://futurism.com/lawyer-studio-ghibli-legal-action-opena... [2]: https://variety.com/vip/how-the-midjourney-lawsuit-impacts-g... [3]: https://www.eweek.com/news/openai-studio-ghibli-ai-art-copyr... |
Nothing having to do with "good faith", but that style isn't really definable. There's thousands of artists that produce very similar outputs.
Also it'd be very stupid, because suddenly it'd turn out that if there's two people that draw nearly identically, one could sue the other even if that happened by chance.
> After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred.
Nothing blurry about it. OpenAI is within full legal right to do it. It's kinda in bad taste, that's about it. Anyone can do it. Disney could make a Ghibli style movie if they ever wanted to.
I'm not sure why all the drama, because who even cares? The reason why I watched Ghibli movies wasn't ever about the particular looks.
> Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at
You better hope it stays at characters, or we're going to have a mess of lawsuits of people and organizations suing each other because they draw eyebrows this particular way. I fail to see why is that at all desirable.
And of course the big corporations will come on top of that.