AI and IP – is it fair?
I’ve become aware of a few things that have been coming up in the news over the last few weeks about AI and creators. AI is such as hot and growing topic, it is something that everyone is talking about.
Let’s start with image creation.
Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney, a popular AI image platform, claiming it used their famous characters—like Elsa and Bart Simpson—without permission to train its AI. The lawsuit says Midjourney then let users make images (and soon videos) based on these characters, which Disney and Universal say is copyright infringement. They want Midjourney to pay for damages and stop using their characters.
Midjourney is a huge success financially:
• Its revenue jumped from $50 million in its first year (2022) to $200 million in 2023, then $300 million in 2024, and is expected to hit $500 million in 2025.
• Most of this money comes from users paying for subscription plans, starting at $10 a month.
• Midjourney is profitable, has never taken outside investment, and now has over 20 million users.
Source:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/give-me-details-of-midjourney-q1PKWpZuRb.chs3ynSdMzg#1
This lawsuit could be a big deal for how AI and copyright law work together in the future.
Is it fair that the creators would miss out on benefitting from what they have created while the AI companies grow?
You can see the details about this case at the link here:
Then we can look at authors in both of the following cases:
Anthropic – is a a USA AI company, that has Claude as one of its AI chatbots.
Anthropic Case:
A judge decided that Anthropic was allowed to use millions of books to train its AI because the AI wasn’t just copying the books—it was learning from them in a new way. That made it “fair use” under the law. But Anthropic still has to go to court over where it got some of those books, since some came from illegal pirated websites.
Meta (Facebook) Case: Meta won a similar case. The court said it was okay for Meta to train its AI on copyrighted books, since the AI wasn’t just copying the books or replacing them. The authors who sued couldn’t prove that Meta’s AI hurt their book sales. But the judge also said this decision only applies to this case, and future lawsuits could turn out differently if there’s stronger proof.
You can read more about these book cases here:
So both these cases ruled in favour of the AI companies over the creators or IP owners!
As a creator myself, it is not right that creators miss out on being recompensed for their creative work!
And another creator has hit back at his videos being used. If you have 10 minutes spare, listen to Evan sharing his experiences.
The challenges of the creator and the machine is just getting started for sure…
Anna
Anna Brewin
Founder, Amanya IP
Intellectual Property Trainer | Designer
M: 07769 923957
E: anna@amanyadesign.com
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