7 ms·

Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco, Square Enix Demand OpenAI to Stop Using Their IP

103 points by signa11 1y ago

signa11 1y ago
to paraphrase: You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television. You wouldn't steal a DVD. Downloading someone's content for AI training is stealing. Stealing is a crime. really, really happy that someone is calling out data-harvesting for what it really is.
- amelius 1y ago
  Showing me ads is stealing too, by the way.
  - elzbardico 1y ago
    No. bad analogy.
    - specproc 1y ago
      Stealing my time and attention. Much more bothered about advertising in my face than IP infringement.
      - elzbardico 1y ago
        In exchange for a service. It is the way you pay it. You can simply refuse to transact.
        wincy 1y ago
        What service am I getting when I’ subjected to a billboard that says “get a smooth kitty” with a picture of a Sphinx cat, exactly? (It’s for laser hair removal and is clever but that makes it more annoying because my kids ask me what it means)
        elzbardico 1y ago
        My bad, I thought you were talking only about advertising in media.
      - goodpoint 1y ago
        And mental health.
      - cm-t 1y ago
        and my energy (CPU, etc)
    - amelius 1y ago
      Then why do companies claim I am stealing from them when I use an adblocker?
      - elzbardico 1y ago
        Because the implicit contract for you to consume their content is that you pay it either by subscribing or by seeing ads. It is not that difficult to understand.
        amelius 1y ago
        But if viewing ads is a payment method, then you must also understand that showing me ads (without giving me anything in return) is stealing.
  - sonicvroooom 1y ago
    depends, they definitely didn't build "the streets" they plaster with ads but if it's their channel or their website, it's up us to pay for blockers, put effort into doing ourselves or using one of the tools build by generous contributors who crave user-defined spaces instead of 'enforced and conform' ("VC"-)demand-based spaces
- pizza234 1y ago
  This issue is not black and white. It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    Embedding other people's work in a vector space, then sampling from the distribution at a different point in the vector space, is not a central member of the "transformative" category. The justifications for allowing transformative uses do not apply to it.
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      That does seem to be the plurality opinion yes. But you are responding to someone saying that what counts as transformative hasn't been decided by saying that you have decided. We don't know how human brains do it. What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way? Would that alter the dialog, or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
      - piva00 1y ago
        > or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we? Because of the scaling abilities of a human brain, you cannot plug more brains into a building to pump out massive amounts of transformative work, it requires a lot for humans to be able to do it which creates a natural limit to the scale it's possible. Scale and degree matter even if the process is 100% analogous to how humans do it, the natural limitation for computers to do it is only compute, which requires some physical server space, and electricity, both of which can be minimised with further technological advances. This completely changes the foundation of the concept for "transformative work" which before required a human being.
        wizzwizz4 1y ago
- pndy 1y ago
  > You wouldn't steal a baby Also counts as "downloading someone's content" - at least partially We will eventually need that policeman's helmet as a retaliation means /s
- energy123 1y ago
  This is an example of why analogies make for bad quality reasoning. The first 3 goods have marginal cost, so stealing them causes direct financial harm. Digital goods have zero marginal cost, so there is not any automatic harm. You may still wish for it to classified as stealing. The law may even agree with you that it is stealing. But it doesn't change the fact that this analogy is useless for the purposes of reasoning.
- wincy 1y ago
  Hah, hilarious this is being unironically used, this was a lame ad old people they put out against piracy, and widely mocked by Millenials in the early 2000s. We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that? Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?
  - b3lvedere 1y ago
    Why not go straight for the goal and just download the Lambo? Copyright/Patent/Intellectual Property for more than 25 years is illogical in my personal weird opinion. I think it grinds innovation to a halt and only serves to generate money. In other news i would glady recieve a lot of money forever just because i invented some thing ages ago. I'm only a humble capitalist human. :) OpenAI will just fork out a bunch of money and settle everything, because that is how money works.
  - pretzellogician 1y ago
    Totally agree! Probably not as much a generational thing ("old people", versus "Millennials" or really, Gen X at that time), as just a tone-deaf shaming attempt by our corporate overlords.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - Kye 1y ago
    Reefer Madness. Satan in vinyl. DnD panic. Downloading as piracy. I was once accused of being a pirate back then because I was talking about downloading in a chatroom. What was I downloading? Linux. Probably Debian. It's the same kind of nonsense as people going around accusing everyone whose process they don't understand of using AI. I'm surprised no one has come after me for making flame fractals.
- Y_Y 1y ago
  Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU
- sshine 1y ago
  You wouldn't download a car. Ironically, that whole anti-piracy campaign used a pirated font: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-anti-piracy-campaign-may-have-used-pirated-fonts/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-... The difference is: You're making copies of something: Scenario 1: I take your baguette. Your hand is empty. You starve. Scenario 2: I take your baguette recipe. You still have a baguette recipe. You continue to live. Scenario 3: I take your baguette recipe and publish it. Your customers leave you. You starve. Copying someone's IP can also impact you economically if your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something. Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property? Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets? It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property. But information wants to be free. It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?
  - CuriousSkeptic 1y ago
    I don’t get it. Did you men that “It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property” follow from “your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something”?
  - pietz 1y ago
    Thanks for sharing the font story! That made me quite a bit happier than it should have.
Marshferm 1y ago
End fair-use protection for harvesting. Otherwise creators will be forced to use new forms of anti-piracy.
- dvt 1y ago
  Google has been harvesting for a quarter of a century, imo that cat has been out of the bag for quite a while now.
  - Marshferm 1y ago
    Irrelevant. Different end state. Different revenue. A claim to unique enough result to monetize.
mafriese 1y ago
I am still torn on this issue. On the one hand, it feels like a copyright violation when other people's works are used to train an ML model. On the other hand, it is not a copyright infringement if I paint a picture in the Studio Ghibli style myself. The question is whether removing a ‘skill requirement’ for replication is sufficient grounds to determine a violation.
- itchyjunk 1y ago
  Is it not a copyright infringement if you pain it yourself? Why is that the case? I thought it would be just that studios wouldn't care for the most part. Hasn't Disney gone after this type of personal projects in the past?
  - malka1986 1y ago
    Using character is copyright infrigement. Using style is not.
- zwnow 1y ago
  Why are you torn on the issue? Its not a secret many original IPs were stolen therefor its a violation. None of the training data was originally drawn by OpenAI. OpenAI also actively monetizes that work.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- CraigRood 1y ago
  It's less about paint a picture yourself, arguably there is little to no value there. OpenAI et al, sell the product of creating pictures in the style of their material. I see this as a direct competition to Studio Ghibli's right to produce their own material with their own IP.
  - throwacct 1y ago
    I agree with this. I don't know how to create artistic styles by hand or using any creative software for that matter. All the LLM tools out there gave me the "ability" and "talent" to create something "good enough" and, in some cases, pretty close to the original art. I rarely use these tools (I'm not in marketing, game design, or any related field), but I can see the problem these tools are causing to artists, etc. Any LLM company offering these services needs to pay the piper.
toinewx 1y ago
It's quite obvious that OpenAI benefited from training on Ghibli material.
- ethmarks 1y ago
  That's not relavent. You can't sue someone for benefitting from your work. You can sue someone for intellectual property theft, which is what OpenAI did.
awakeasleep 1y ago
To me, it was a tasteless and awful act, but not illegal. Anyone else see that distinction?
- blibble 1y ago
  willful commercial copyright infringement at scale is a felony
  - ekianjo 1y ago
    Traiñing models is not copyright infrigement
    - blibble 1y ago
      that remains to be seen and especially outside of the united states most countries have no concept of "fair use" whatsoever
      - ekianjo 1y ago
        Even fan art manga in Japan is a thing so fair use is more widespread than you may think
    - trollbridge 1y ago
      Generating obviously infringing material is, though, even if there are lots of intermediate steps to do so.
      - ekianjo 1y ago
        What is obviously infringing? If this was the case then why don't they sue OpenAI directly if it's so "obvious".
- sim7c00 1y ago
  nice opinion. now base it on laws and regulations that apply to these companies and show whether it is actually legal or not... - this is not a realm of feelings.
mns 1y ago
It's fair use if you do it, it's stealing if someone else does it to you, this is the normal playbook of the likes of Meta, Microsoft, OpenAi and the others.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Right. When can I run Microsoft Office through a “transformation” and then claim it magically isn’t covered by copyright laws?
  - vladms 1y ago
    Did Microsoft say that OpenOffice/Libreoffice's interface was directly copyright infringement? I know people that could not make a distinction 10 years ago (now with the ribbons is simpler to distinguish). Ofc Microsoft tried to limit the use of OpenOffice/LibreOffice using file format quirks and other strategies, so they are no angel, but still I don't know of a clear parallel.
matsemann 1y ago
How have they gotten the "Studio Ghibli" look into the training data? Have they actually bought all the movies, or how does it work?
- dschu 1y ago
  I guess it’s like 1) Download Ghibli film material from an arrrr site. Extract frames using ffmpeg. Pay someone $1 per week in Nigeria to add metadata for each (or some) frame(s). 2) ??? 3) Profit
- svantana 1y ago
  there are probably millions of stills from their movies on the web.
- ethmarks 1y ago
  It's possible that they purchased the movies (although definitely without the proper licensing; buying a DVD allows for personal use, not training a commercial model), or maybe they simply pirated them. It's also possible that models' entire understanding of the aesthetic comes from screenshots of the movie. Even if OpenAI didn't feed in each frame of the movie, they definitely fed in lots of images from the web, some of which were almost certainly movie screenshots.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  There is a huge amount of artists copying that look.
dzink 1y ago
Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.
- flatline 1y ago
  There’s certainly a difference with AI. Not only can it reproduce exactly the same characters - in fact I doubt you can train the style without this ability - it puts those characters in reach of crayon-age children at a professional capacity. This crosses the line between copying and enabling IP theft in my mind. While I don’t agree with our current IP laws, the ease and rapidity of this seems like a real problem. How long before some kid in a third world country can produce a feature length Ghibli-esque movie and distribute it online? And how much will this dilute their brand etc? Is it really so much to ask the AI companies to filter their training sets?
  - dzink 1y ago
    Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code. In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed. Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial. However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering. That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.
nrjames 1y ago
In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.
- oulipo2 1y ago
  I'd argue that if an art piece is famous enough, then it ought to become "public". In the sense that, yes, the artist made it and it became famous, but once it reaches a certain scale of fame, it means that the public itself made the work famous. So it's a kind of co-creation (eg for instance the fact that people were writing fan-fiction about Harry Potter or whatever, contributing to the fame of the book, etc). So in this case, after it has reached a sufficient level of fame, it should become public work
- data-ottawa 1y ago
  That is a huge oversimplification. In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career. I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line. This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish). There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.
  - esalman 1y ago
    Very well put. It boggles my mind that some people cannot separate individual from corporations. As if their mind are not able to comprehend how corporations can cause harm at scale.
dvt 1y ago
This will be litigated and I have a feeling OpenAI/Anthropic/Claude/MistralAI will win, since we've been down similar roads before[1]. With that said, AI slop will never be a replacement for human creativity, and while AI is pretty incredible technology, I'm actually way more bullish on people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
- Marshferm 1y ago
  You don’t grasp how anime and IP are underwritten by the state in Japan. It will firewall this and then other creators will follow their lead. The point is to head off slop, not allow it. Litigation isn’t the end, firewalls are. We’re deving a game AI can’t use. We’ve invented several firewalls. This is the future.
- NaomiLehman 1y ago
  as much as I hate the AI companies, I think I hate copyright more.
infecto 1y ago
Interesting to see how people feel about copyright law. If it’s a them the individual downloading IP it’s screw those evil IP holders. If it’s OpenAI we’ll screw OpenAI!! I for one am interested to see how courts globally figure out what is acceptable or not. The problem imo is the cat is already out of the bag. No government is going to stop progress in LLM. I also have to wonder if we are better off in society to allow this type of IP infringement, not thinking about copying art style but being able to ingest research and other important pieces of information.
psychoslave 1y ago
It makes wonder what will happen when robots will really take care of everything unpleasant there might be to do in life. All these laws and social systems designed to pretend merit and hard effort is why there are ridiculously disparate of wealth among humans, it's not going to accept that wage slavery is actually not only irrelevant but far more inefficient. It's not going to stop without change resistance for sure.
- malka1986 1y ago
  These robots will be used to eliminate the working class.
biophysboy 1y ago
I think AI seriously breaks down the “transformative work” condition used to determine fair use. The work is clearly being transformed, but it also doesn’t seem fair. These models critically depend on many hours of artistic effort during training/prompting, but don’t require any additional effort by the new distributors/consumers. On top of that, proper attribution is often impossible.
dilawar 1y ago
The podcast 'in our time' (bbc) has an episode on 'copyright': https://pca.st/episode/928a7b98-18c0-4c70-8558-8ef982ce08de https://pca.st/episode/928a7b98-18c0-4c70-8558-8ef982ce08de From its title "In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction. Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence. With: Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge Will Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.
LatteLazy 1y ago
Counter point from the wider creative industry: https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=XXJ9l7O4Y3lxfEci https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=XXJ9l7O4Y3lxfEci [video]
cm-t 1y ago
I wish robots.txt were forced to be followed by AI parser...
PhotonHunter 1y ago
Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.
- episteme 1y ago
  Can a style be trademarked? I thought that was what copyright was meant to cover.
  - Kye 1y ago
    (not a lawyer) This is the exact opposite of how it works, at least in the US. Copyright: covers works on publication. Registering it allows for seeking of statutory damages. Trademark: covers defining characteristics. This can be muddy since defining characteristics are not necessarily the same as style. It can be especially confusing when certain things become characteristic of a genre. This is mostly what transformer and diffusion models cover: the strongest weights will be what's most common in the training data. You get a lot of em dashes and heroes in colorful outfits, but they don't constitute a violation on their own in any modern model unless the operator of the model goes out of their way to violate.
Incipient 1y ago
I thought all this was already solved when some US court ruled AI to be "transformative" and hence ok?
sireat 1y ago
OpenAI has ridiculous guardrails for illustrations covering any public domain subject that has been covered by Disney or any other major public corporation. So by that benchmark Japanese companies have a case. Try generating a 19th century style illustration of Snow White. You can't at least not on OpenAI platform. Try generating a picture "of flying boy fighting a pirate on a ship".

103 points by signa11 1y ago

to paraphrase: You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television. You wouldn't steal a DVD. Downloading someone's content for AI training is stealing. Stealing is a crime. really, really happy that someone is calling out data-harvesting for what it really is.

amelius 1y ago
Showing me ads is stealing too, by the way.
- elzbardico 1y ago
  No. bad analogy.
  - specproc 1y ago
    Stealing my time and attention. Much more bothered about advertising in my face than IP infringement.
    - elzbardico 1y ago
      In exchange for a service. It is the way you pay it. You can simply refuse to transact.
      - wincy 1y ago
        What service am I getting when I’ subjected to a billboard that says “get a smooth kitty” with a picture of a Sphinx cat, exactly? (It’s for laser hair removal and is clever but that makes it more annoying because my kids ask me what it means)
        elzbardico 1y ago
        My bad, I thought you were talking only about advertising in media.
    - goodpoint 1y ago
      And mental health.
    - cm-t 1y ago
      and my energy (CPU, etc)
  - amelius 1y ago
    Then why do companies claim I am stealing from them when I use an adblocker?
    - elzbardico 1y ago
      Because the implicit contract for you to consume their content is that you pay it either by subscribing or by seeing ads. It is not that difficult to understand.
      - amelius 1y ago
        But if viewing ads is a payment method, then you must also understand that showing me ads (without giving me anything in return) is stealing.
- sonicvroooom 1y ago
  depends, they definitely didn't build "the streets" they plaster with ads but if it's their channel or their website, it's up us to pay for blockers, put effort into doing ourselves or using one of the tools build by generous contributors who crave user-defined spaces instead of 'enforced and conform' ("VC"-)demand-based spaces
pizza234 1y ago
This issue is not black and white. It is accepted, within limits, for humans do transformative work, but it's not been yet established which the limits for AIs are, primarily (IMO): 1. whether the work is transformative or not 2. whether the scale of transformation/distribution changes the nature of the work.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  Embedding other people's work in a vector space, then sampling from the distribution at a different point in the vector space, is not a central member of the "transformative" category. The justifications for allowing transformative uses do not apply to it.
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    That does seem to be the plurality opinion yes. But you are responding to someone saying that what counts as transformative hasn't been decided by saying that you have decided. We don't know how human brains do it. What if we found that humans actually do it in the same way? Would that alter the dialog, or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we?
    - piva00 1y ago
      > or should we still give preference to humans? If we should, why should we? Because of the scaling abilities of a human brain, you cannot plug more brains into a building to pump out massive amounts of transformative work, it requires a lot for humans to be able to do it which creates a natural limit to the scale it's possible. Scale and degree matter even if the process is 100% analogous to how humans do it, the natural limitation for computers to do it is only compute, which requires some physical server space, and electricity, both of which can be minimised with further technological advances. This completely changes the foundation of the concept for "transformative work" which before required a human being.
      - wizzwizz4 1y ago
pndy 1y ago
> You wouldn't steal a baby Also counts as "downloading someone's content" - at least partially We will eventually need that policeman's helmet as a retaliation means /s
energy123 1y ago
This is an example of why analogies make for bad quality reasoning. The first 3 goods have marginal cost, so stealing them causes direct financial harm. Digital goods have zero marginal cost, so there is not any automatic harm. You may still wish for it to classified as stealing. The law may even agree with you that it is stealing. But it doesn't change the fact that this analogy is useless for the purposes of reasoning.
wincy 1y ago
Hah, hilarious this is being unironically used, this was a lame ad old people they put out against piracy, and widely mocked by Millenials in the early 2000s. We've have always known we should harvest the internet for absolutely everything. If we don't, it's fine, we can squabble about our IP and China will just ingest the entire Internet, make a model out of it, then release the Ghiblifier and we'll all download it or run it on Openrouter. You can already download Hunyuan Image 3.0 and it's just as good as OpenAI's image create, if not better. What's Japan going to do about that? Also, for the record, I would absolutely download a handbag, or a television, or a DVD, or a car, if I could. I'd be pumping out Louis Vuittons and iPhones for my kids all day long, and driving a Lambo because why not?
- b3lvedere 1y ago
  Why not go straight for the goal and just download the Lambo? Copyright/Patent/Intellectual Property for more than 25 years is illogical in my personal weird opinion. I think it grinds innovation to a halt and only serves to generate money. In other news i would glady recieve a lot of money forever just because i invented some thing ages ago. I'm only a humble capitalist human. :) OpenAI will just fork out a bunch of money and settle everything, because that is how money works.
- pretzellogician 1y ago
  Totally agree! Probably not as much a generational thing ("old people", versus "Millennials" or really, Gen X at that time), as just a tone-deaf shaming attempt by our corporate overlords.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- Kye 1y ago
  Reefer Madness. Satan in vinyl. DnD panic. Downloading as piracy. I was once accused of being a pirate back then because I was talking about downloading in a chatroom. What was I downloading? Linux. Probably Debian. It's the same kind of nonsense as people going around accusing everyone whose process they don't understand of using AI. I'm surprised no one has come after me for making flame fractals.
Y_Y 1y ago
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU
sshine 1y ago
You wouldn't download a car. Ironically, that whole anti-piracy campaign used a pirated font: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-car-anti-piracy-campaign-may-have-used-pirated-fonts/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/you-wouldnt-steal-a-... The difference is: You're making copies of something: Scenario 1: I take your baguette. Your hand is empty. You starve. Scenario 2: I take your baguette recipe. You still have a baguette recipe. You continue to live. Scenario 3: I take your baguette recipe and publish it. Your customers leave you. You starve. Copying someone's IP can also impact you economically if your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something. Should we enforce the protection of people's right to have monopoly of distribution of intellectual property? Or should we accept that in reality, copies are free and distribution monopolies only exist in inefficient markets? It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property. But information wants to be free. It's a dilemma. Do we side what feels right, or what's real?
- CuriousSkeptic 1y ago
  I don’t get it. Did you men that “It seems totally right to protect people's intellectual property” follow from “your financial model depends on you being the only distributor of copies of something”?
- pietz 1y ago
  Thanks for sharing the font story! That made me quite a bit happier than it should have.

Marshferm 1y ago

End fair-use protection for harvesting. Otherwise creators will be forced to use new forms of anti-piracy.

dvt 1y ago
Google has been harvesting for a quarter of a century, imo that cat has been out of the bag for quite a while now.
- Marshferm 1y ago
  Irrelevant. Different end state. Different revenue. A claim to unique enough result to monetize.

mafriese 1y ago

I am still torn on this issue. On the one hand, it feels like a copyright violation when other people's works are used to train an ML model. On the other hand, it is not a copyright infringement if I paint a picture in the Studio Ghibli style myself. The question is whether removing a ‘skill requirement’ for replication is sufficient grounds to determine a violation.

itchyjunk 1y ago
Is it not a copyright infringement if you pain it yourself? Why is that the case? I thought it would be just that studios wouldn't care for the most part. Hasn't Disney gone after this type of personal projects in the past?
- malka1986 1y ago
  Using character is copyright infrigement. Using style is not.
zwnow 1y ago
Why are you torn on the issue? Its not a secret many original IPs were stolen therefor its a violation. None of the training data was originally drawn by OpenAI. OpenAI also actively monetizes that work.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
CraigRood 1y ago
It's less about paint a picture yourself, arguably there is little to no value there. OpenAI et al, sell the product of creating pictures in the style of their material. I see this as a direct competition to Studio Ghibli's right to produce their own material with their own IP.
- throwacct 1y ago
  I agree with this. I don't know how to create artistic styles by hand or using any creative software for that matter. All the LLM tools out there gave me the "ability" and "talent" to create something "good enough" and, in some cases, pretty close to the original art. I rarely use these tools (I'm not in marketing, game design, or any related field), but I can see the problem these tools are causing to artists, etc. Any LLM company offering these services needs to pay the piper.

toinewx 1y ago

It's quite obvious that OpenAI benefited from training on Ghibli material.

ethmarks 1y ago
That's not relavent. You can't sue someone for benefitting from your work. You can sue someone for intellectual property theft, which is what OpenAI did.

awakeasleep 1y ago

To me, it was a tasteless and awful act, but not illegal. Anyone else see that distinction?

blibble 1y ago
willful commercial copyright infringement at scale is a felony
- ekianjo 1y ago
  Traiñing models is not copyright infrigement
  - blibble 1y ago
    that remains to be seen and especially outside of the united states most countries have no concept of "fair use" whatsoever
    - ekianjo 1y ago
      Even fan art manga in Japan is a thing so fair use is more widespread than you may think
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    Generating obviously infringing material is, though, even if there are lots of intermediate steps to do so.
    - ekianjo 1y ago
      What is obviously infringing? If this was the case then why don't they sue OpenAI directly if it's so "obvious".
sim7c00 1y ago
nice opinion. now base it on laws and regulations that apply to these companies and show whether it is actually legal or not... - this is not a realm of feelings.

mns 1y ago

It's fair use if you do it, it's stealing if someone else does it to you, this is the normal playbook of the likes of Meta, Microsoft, OpenAi and the others.

trollbridge 1y ago
Right. When can I run Microsoft Office through a “transformation” and then claim it magically isn’t covered by copyright laws?
- vladms 1y ago
  Did Microsoft say that OpenOffice/Libreoffice's interface was directly copyright infringement? I know people that could not make a distinction 10 years ago (now with the ribbons is simpler to distinguish). Ofc Microsoft tried to limit the use of OpenOffice/LibreOffice using file format quirks and other strategies, so they are no angel, but still I don't know of a clear parallel.

matsemann 1y ago

How have they gotten the "Studio Ghibli" look into the training data? Have they actually bought all the movies, or how does it work?

dschu 1y ago
I guess it’s like 1) Download Ghibli film material from an arrrr site. Extract frames using ffmpeg. Pay someone $1 per week in Nigeria to add metadata for each (or some) frame(s). 2) ??? 3) Profit
svantana 1y ago
there are probably millions of stills from their movies on the web.
ethmarks 1y ago
It's possible that they purchased the movies (although definitely without the proper licensing; buying a DVD allows for personal use, not training a commercial model), or maybe they simply pirated them. It's also possible that models' entire understanding of the aesthetic comes from screenshots of the movie. Even if OpenAI didn't feed in each frame of the movie, they definitely fed in lots of images from the web, some of which were almost certainly movie screenshots.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
There is a huge amount of artists copying that look.

dzink 1y ago

Human learning is transformative. It takes time. Time, not money, is the criteria for value to human life. Humans can re-draw in styles they see and the law sees it as transformative work. Humans draw conclusions from learning and apply it to other fields - that’s natural intelligence. If AI helps humans make more new, transformative work, not the same characters as the studios, not the same plots, then the studio should not try to rent-extract. Otherwise someone will try to do it to stick figures and any other style and you’d have to teach toddlers rules for any stile before you give them a crayon. The only real impact will be that hype and styles “in fashion” will just play out faster and in the mean time the Studios get their name sealed in human minds for anything done in their style - which is more immortality than abuse.

flatline 1y ago
There’s certainly a difference with AI. Not only can it reproduce exactly the same characters - in fact I doubt you can train the style without this ability - it puts those characters in reach of crayon-age children at a professional capacity. This crosses the line between copying and enabling IP theft in my mind. While I don’t agree with our current IP laws, the ease and rapidity of this seems like a real problem. How long before some kid in a third world country can produce a feature length Ghibli-esque movie and distribute it online? And how much will this dilute their brand etc? Is it really so much to ask the AI companies to filter their training sets?
- dzink 1y ago
  Exploring the scenarios and corner cases is how rules should be written, just like any code. In this case producing anything commercial and anything with AI period should always be disclosed. Since at this stage we can often tell when something is AI (though not everyone and not always), especially food images at a restaurant, for me that immediately downgrades the quality or value of a product That’s going to be the natural human response. And users of the tech will likely be lumped in with very poor attempts, downgrading the value of anyone who uses it. That is natural payback for trying to go commercial. However in the hobbyist space - the space where humans learn what AI attempts will also do is expand the creative space massively - people will get to iterate much faster with their own styles and new styles will emerge. Just like the invention of writing and publishing - the original writers were people with tremendous time and resource privilege on their hands, but the art of writing would have never ever bloomed if it didn’t become available to anyone over time. Humans then draw higher order conclusions and insights from the abundance, even if it takes energy for filtering. That said, abuse in the form of pretending something generated is real or taking credit for generated work as real should be illegal. If you teach the moral compass along with the book or you built the identification along with the work you will get a lot more authentic novelty even with AI tools.

nrjames 1y ago

In the world of tattooing, it’s frowned upon for a tattoo artist to take another tattoo artist’s original work and replicate it without permission, yet it’s common practice to take well known IP (Pokémon, Studio Ghibli, etc) and tattoo that on a client. The ethical boundary seems to be between whether the source artwork was created by an individual vs. a corporation.

oulipo2 1y ago
I'd argue that if an art piece is famous enough, then it ought to become "public". In the sense that, yes, the artist made it and it became famous, but once it reaches a certain scale of fame, it means that the public itself made the work famous. So it's a kind of co-creation (eg for instance the fact that people were writing fan-fiction about Harry Potter or whatever, contributing to the fame of the book, etc). So in this case, after it has reached a sufficient level of fame, it should become public work
data-ottawa 1y ago
That is a huge oversimplification. In the tattoo case, tattooing pikachu on a person does not harm Nintendo’s business, but copying another tattoo artist’s work or style directly takes their business. Tattoo art is an industry where your art style largely defines your career. I can see the argument LLMs are transformative, but when you set up specific evaluation of copying a company/artist and then advertise that you clone that specific studio’s work, that’s harming them and in my opinion crossing a line. This isn’t an individual vs corporation thing, (though people are very selfish). There’s so much more here than just corporate vs individual. There’s the sheer scale of it, the enforcement double standards, questions of consent, and taking advantage of the commons (artists public work) etc. To characterize it as people not liking business is plain wrong.
- esalman 1y ago
  Very well put. It boggles my mind that some people cannot separate individual from corporations. As if their mind are not able to comprehend how corporations can cause harm at scale.

dvt 1y ago

This will be litigated and I have a feeling OpenAI/Anthropic/Claude/MistralAI will win, since we've been down similar roads before[1]. With that said, AI slop will never be a replacement for human creativity, and while AI is pretty incredible technology, I'm actually way more bullish on people. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

Marshferm 1y ago
You don’t grasp how anime and IP are underwritten by the state in Japan. It will firewall this and then other creators will follow their lead. The point is to head off slop, not allow it. Litigation isn’t the end, firewalls are. We’re deving a game AI can’t use. We’ve invented several firewalls. This is the future.
NaomiLehman 1y ago
as much as I hate the AI companies, I think I hate copyright more.

infecto 1y ago

Interesting to see how people feel about copyright law. If it’s a them the individual downloading IP it’s screw those evil IP holders. If it’s OpenAI we’ll screw OpenAI!! I for one am interested to see how courts globally figure out what is acceptable or not. The problem imo is the cat is already out of the bag. No government is going to stop progress in LLM. I also have to wonder if we are better off in society to allow this type of IP infringement, not thinking about copying art style but being able to ingest research and other important pieces of information.

psychoslave 1y ago

It makes wonder what will happen when robots will really take care of everything unpleasant there might be to do in life. All these laws and social systems designed to pretend merit and hard effort is why there are ridiculously disparate of wealth among humans, it's not going to accept that wage slavery is actually not only irrelevant but far more inefficient. It's not going to stop without change resistance for sure.

malka1986 1y ago
These robots will be used to eliminate the working class.

biophysboy 1y ago

I think AI seriously breaks down the “transformative work” condition used to determine fair use. The work is clearly being transformed, but it also doesn’t seem fair. These models critically depend on many hours of artistic effort during training/prompting, but don’t require any additional effort by the new distributors/consumers. On top of that, proper attribution is often impossible.

dilawar 1y ago

The podcast 'in our time' (bbc) has an episode on 'copyright': https://pca.st/episode/928a7b98-18c0-4c70-8558-8ef982ce08de https://pca.st/episode/928a7b98-18c0-4c70-8558-8ef982ce08de From its title "In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world’s first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction. Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence. With: Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Cambridge Will Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, Paris Katie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London.

LatteLazy 1y ago

Counter point from the wider creative industry: https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=XXJ9l7O4Y3lxfEci https://youtu.be/X9RYuvPCQUA?si=XXJ9l7O4Y3lxfEci [video]

cm-t 1y ago

I wish robots.txt were forced to be followed by AI parser...

PhotonHunter 1y ago

Is it possible that the primary liability for OpenAI is trade dress? If you can produce things in (for example) the style of a Studio Ghibli film, such that an ordinary consumer can’t tell if the source is Studio Ghibli or AI, is that actionable? I feel like I see copyright concerns all the time with AI but rarely is trademark discussed.

episteme 1y ago
Can a style be trademarked? I thought that was what copyright was meant to cover.
- Kye 1y ago
  (not a lawyer) This is the exact opposite of how it works, at least in the US. Copyright: covers works on publication. Registering it allows for seeking of statutory damages. Trademark: covers defining characteristics. This can be muddy since defining characteristics are not necessarily the same as style. It can be especially confusing when certain things become characteristic of a genre. This is mostly what transformer and diffusion models cover: the strongest weights will be what's most common in the training data. You get a lot of em dashes and heroes in colorful outfits, but they don't constitute a violation on their own in any modern model unless the operator of the model goes out of their way to violate.

Incipient 1y ago

I thought all this was already solved when some US court ruled AI to be "transformative" and hence ok?

sireat 1y ago

OpenAI has ridiculous guardrails for illustrations covering any public domain subject that has been covered by Disney or any other major public corporation. So by that benchmark Japanese companies have a case. Try generating a 19th century style illustration of Snow White. You can't at least not on OpenAI platform. Try generating a picture "of flying boy fighting a pirate on a ship".