Oh now you’ve done it! When one of the most litigious companies in the history of protecting its brand and beloved characters files suit, you better be paying attention. Do you know why you don’t see Disney characters cosplayed at ComiCons? Because of Disney. They will sue you. For cosplaying as one of their characters. Why? Because it is their brand. So when Gen AI clearly used Disney’s content in their datasets, without permission — as seen by the ability to create these characters in Midjourney outputs, we all should’ve assumed one day Disney would come a knocking. Well, that day has come.
What makes this infringement suit against Gen AI so strong is that it is clear as the outputs created that Disney’s content was exploited, clearly without permission, and it is allowing endless creation of blatant infringing content. There is the time honored BS argument that a service is not liable for the outputs its users generate, but when it stole content to make those outputs possible, things get interesting. This lawsuit is one of the big hammers that some of us were waiting to see dropped. They say that a brand’s copyright or trademark claim is watered out if a company does not pursue legal action against those that infringe, even in small ways, well, Disney’s copyrights are as pure as … well, we’ll avoid making possibly inappropriate sardonic comments here about the personal beliefs of one Walt Disney and just end this post here instead.
PS Gen AI featured image brought to you by “prompting workarounds” and Midjourney, the personified robot friend.
