We all know what it means when Midjourney churns out pictures that look like your art: their model got trained on your stuff. I think it’s time for Jason Allen to go full uroboros and sue Midjourney for using his art without permission.
They’re so close to figuring it out but don’t have that much self awareness, or perhaps just have cognitive disonance about it.
“All Allen could copyright was what he did to the image himself” - so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable? Does that mean midjourney has the copyright of all the images created with it?
so if he trained the model himself, would that make the work copyrightable?
I think if he “trained” the model on art he himself created you might have an argument.
Not in the US, there art can only be created by a human.
If it’s created by an algorithm or animal supernatural being it’s public domain.Interesting facts:
- when photography was invented there was a debate whether photos can be copyrighted
- if you claim to have written down something revealed to you by a supernatural entity, it’s public domain
- the following image is public domain because it was taken by a monkey
The image gatcha does not create a new copyright. There might be a copyright in the text of a complex prompt (do you feel lucky in court?) Mere “sweat of the brow” does not generate a new copyright in the US, so e.g. retouching work on a photo does not generate a new copyright and photos of a public domain artwork do not create a new copyright.
This doesn’t touch on the old copyrights of the stuff Midjourney trained on to make its computer-mediated collages. Those copyrights still exist.
Does the computer-mediated collage launder the previous copyrights? The answer is “do you feel lucky in court?”
It’s Tornado Cash, but for pictures of Garfield with a machete.
North Korea: “AUGH MY EYES”
