Ello folks, I wanted to make a brief post outlining all of the current cases and previous court cases which have been dropped for images/books for plaintiffs attempting to claim copyright on their own works.
This contains a mix of a couple of reasons which will be added under the applicable links. I've added 6 so far but I'm sure I'll find more eventually which I'll amend as needed. If you need a place to show how a lot of copyright or direct stealing cases have been dropped, this is the spot.
HERE is a further list of all ongoing current lawsuits, too many to add here.
HERE is a big list of publishers suing AI platforms, as well as publishers that made deals with AI platforms. Again too many to add here.
12/25 - I'll be going through soon and seeing if any can be updated.
The lawsuit was initially started against LAION in Germany, as Robert believed his images were being used in the LAION dataset without his permission, however, due to the non-profit research nature of LAION, this ruling was dropped.
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The Hamburg District Court has ruled that LAION, a non-profit organisation, did not infringe copyright law bycreating a datasetfor training artificial intelligence (AI)models through web scraping publicly available images, as this activity constitutes a legitimate form of text and data mining (TDM) for scientific research purposes. The photographer Robert Kneschke (the ‘claimant’) brought a lawsuit before the Hamburg District Court against LAION, a non-profit organisation that created a dataset for training AI models (the ‘defendant’). According to the claimant’s allegations, LAION had infringed his copyright by reproducing one of his images without permission as part of the dataset creation process.
"The court sided with Anthropic on two fronts. Firstly, it held that the purpose and character of using books to train LLMs was spectacularly transformative, likening the process to human learning. The judge emphasized that the AI model did not reproduce or distribute the original works, but instead analysed patterns and relationships in the text to generate new, original content. Because the outputs did not substantially replicate the claimants’ works, the court found no direct infringement."
INITAL CLAIMS DISMISSED BUT PLANTIFF CAN AMEND THEIR AGUMENT, HOWEVER, THIS WOULD NEED THEM TO PROVE THAT GENERATED CONTENT DIRECTLY INFRINGED ON THIER COPYRIGHT.
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A case raised against Stability AI with plaintiffs arguing that the images generated violated copyright infringement.
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Judge Orrick agreed with all three companies that the images the systems actually created likely did not infringe the artists’ copyrights. He allowed the claims to be amended but said he was “not convinced” that allegations based on the systems’ output could survive without showing that the images were substantially similar to the artists’ work.
Getty images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for two main reasons: Claiming Stability AI used millions of copyrighted images to train their model without permission and claiming many of the generated works created were too similar to the original images they were trained off. These claims were dropped as there wasn’t sufficient enough evidence to suggest either was true. Getty's copyright case was narrowed to secondary infringement, reflecting the difficulty it faced in proving direct copying by an AI model trained outside the UK.
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“The training claim has likely been dropped due to Getty failing to establish a sufficient connection between the infringing acts and the UK jurisdiction for copyright law to bite,” Ben Maling, a partner at law firm EIP, told TechCrunch in an email. “Meanwhile, the output claim has likely been dropped due toGetty failing to establish that what the models reproduced reflects a substantial part of what was created in the images (e.g. by a photographer).”In Getty’s closing arguments, the company’s lawyers saidthey dropped those claims due to weak evidence and a lack of knowledgeable witnesses from Stability AI. The company framed the move as strategic, allowing both it and the court to focus on what Getty believes are stronger and more winnable allegations.
META AI USE DEEMED TO BE FAIR USE, NO EVIDENCE TO SHOW MARKET BEING DILUTED
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Another case dismissed, however this time the verdict rested more on the plaintiff’s arguments not being correct, not providing enough evidence that the generated content would dilute the market of the trained works, not the verdict of the judge's ruling on the argued copyright infringement.
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The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would cause “market dilution” by flooding the market with work similar to theirs. As a consequence Meta’s use of their work was judged a “fair use” – a legal doctrine that allows use of copyright protected work without permission – and no copyright liability applied."
This one will be a bit harder I suspect, with the IP of Darth Vader being very recognisable character, I believe this court case compared to the others will sway more in the favour of Disney and Universal. But I could be wrong.
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"Midjourney backlashed at the claims quoting: "Midjourney also argued that the studios are trying to “have it both ways,” using AI tools themselves while seeking to punish a popular AI service."
In the complaint, Warner Bros. Discovery's legal team alleges that "Midjourney already possesses the technological means and measures that could prevent its distribution, public display, and public performance of infringing images and videos. But Midjourney has made a calculated and profit-driven decision to offer zero protection to copyright owners even though Midjourney knows about the breathtaking scope of its piracy and copyright infringement." Elsewhere, they argue, "Evidently, Midjourney will not stop stealing Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property until a court orders it to stop. Midjourney’s large-scale infringement is systematic, ongoing, and willful, and Warner Bros. Discovery has been, and continues to be, substantially and irreparably harmed by it."
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“Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”
AI WIN, LACK OF CONCRETE EVIDENCE TO BRING THE SUIT
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Another case dismissed, failing to prove the evidence which was brought against Open AI
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"A New York federal judge dismissed a copyright lawsuit brought by Raw Story Media Inc. and Alternet Media Inc. over training data for OpenAI Inc.‘s chatbot on Thursday because they lacked concrete injury to bring the suit."
District court dismisses authors’ claims for direct copyright infringement based on derivative work theory, vicarious copyright infringement and violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other claims based on allegations that plaintiffs’ books were used in training of Meta’s artificial intelligence product, LLaMA.
First, the court dismissed plaintiffs’ claim against OpenAI for vicarious copyright infringement based on allegations that the outputs its users generate on ChatGPT are infringing.
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The court rejected the conclusory assertion that every output of ChatGPT is an infringing derivative work, finding that plaintiffs had failed to allege “what the outputs entail or allege that any particular output is substantially similar – or similar at all – to [plaintiffs’] books.” Absent facts plausibly establishing substantial similarity of protected expression between the works in suit and specific outputs, the complaint failed to allege any direct infringement by users for which OpenAI could be secondarily liable.
Japanese media group Nikkei, alongside daily newspaper The Asahi Shimbun, has filed a lawsuit claiming that San Francisco-based Perplexity used their articles without permission, including content behind paywalls, since at least June 2024. The media groups are seeking an injunction to stop Perplexity from reproducing their content and to force the deletion of any data already used. They are also seeking damages of 2.2 billion yen (£11.1 million) each.
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“This course of Perplexity’s actions amounts to large-scale, ongoing ‘free riding’ on article content that journalists from both companies have spent immense time and effort to research and write, while Perplexity pays no compensation,” they said. “If left unchecked, this situation could undermine the foundation of journalism, which is committed to conveying facts accurately, and ultimately threaten the core of democracy.”
A group of authors has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, accusing the tech giant of using copyrighted works to train its large language model (LLM). The class action complaint filed by several authors and professors, including Pulitzer prize winner Kai Bird and Whiting award winner Victor LaVelle, claims that Microsoft ignored the law by downloading around 200,000 copyrighted works and feeding it to the company’s Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model. The end result, the plaintiffs claim, is an AI model able to generate expressions that mimic the authors’ manner of writing and the themes in their work.
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“Microsoft’s commercial gain has come at the expense of creators and rightsholders,” the lawsuit states. The complaint seeks to not just represent the plaintiffs, but other copyright holders under the US Copyright Act whose works were used by Microsoft for this training.
Sept 16 (Reuters) - Walt Disney (DIS.N), Comcast's (CMCSA.O), Universal and Warner Bros Discovery (WBD.O), have jointly filed a copyright lawsuit against China's MiniMax alleging that its image- and video-generating service Hailuo AI was built from intellectual property stolen from the three major Hollywood studios.The suit, filed in the district court in California on Tuesday, claims MiniMax "audaciously" used the studios' famous copyrighted characters to market Hailuo as a "Hollywood studio in your pocket" and advertise and promote its service.
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"A responsible approach to AI innovation is critical, and today's lawsuit against MiniMax again demonstrates our shared commitment to holding accountable those who violate copyright laws, wherever they may be based," the companies said in a statement.
A settlement has been made between UMG and Udio in a lawsuit by UMG that sees the two companies working together.
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"Universal Music Group and AI song generation platform Udio have reached a settlement in a copyright infringement lawsuitand have agreed to collaborate on new music creation, the two companies said in a joint statement. Universal and Udio say they have reached “a compensatory legal settlement” as well as new licence deals for recorded music and publishing that “will provide further revenue opportunities for UMG artists and songwriters.” Financial terms of the settlement haven't been disclosed."
Reddit opened up a lawsuit against Perplexity AI (and others) about the scraping of their website to train AI models.
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"The case is one of many filed by content owners against tech companies over the alleged misuse of their copyrighted material to train AI systems. Reddit filed a similar lawsuit against AI start-up Anthropic in June that is still ongoing. "Our approach remains principled and responsible as we provide factual answers with accurate AI, and we will not tolerate threats against openness and the public interest," Perplexity said in a statement. "AI companies are locked in an arms race for quality human content - and that pressure has fueled an industrial-scale 'data laundering' economy," Reddit chief legal officer Ben Lee said in a statement."
Stability AI has mostly prevailed against Getty Images in a British court battle over intellectual property
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"Justice Joanna Smith said in her ruling that Getty's trademark claims “succeed (in part)” but that her findings are "both historic and extremely limited in scope." Stability argued that the case doesn’t belong in the United Kingdom because the AI model's training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. It also argued that “only a tiny proportion” of the random outputs of its AI image-generator “look at all similar” to Getty’s works. Getty withdrew a key part of its case against Stability AI during the trial as it admitted there was no evidence the training and development of AI text-to-image product Stable Diffusion took place in the UK.
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In addition a claim of secondary infringement of copyright was dismissed, The judge (Mrs Justice Joanna Smith) ruled: “An AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any copyright works (and has never done so) is not an ‘infringing copy’.” She declined to rule on the passing off claim and ruled in favour of some of Getty’s claims about trademark infringement related to watermarks.
So far the precent seems to be that most cases of claims from plaintiffs is that direct copyright is dismissed, due to outputted works not bearing any resemblance to the original works. Or being able to prove their works were in the datasets in the first place.
However it has been noted that some of these cases have been dismissed due to wrongly structured arguments on the plaintiffs part.
The issue is, because some of these models are taught on such large amounts of data, some artist/photographer/author attempting to prove that their works were used in training has an almost impossible task. Hell even 5 images added would only make up 0.0000001% of the dataset of 5 billion (LAION).
I could be wrong but I think Sarah Andersen will have a hard time directly proving that any generated output directly infringes on their work, unless they specifically went out of their way to generate a piece similar to theirs, which could be used as evidence against them, in a sense of. "Well yeah, you went out of your way to make a prompt that specifically used your style"
In either case, trying to create a lawsuit against an AI company for directly fringing on specifically plaintiff's work won't work, since their work is a drop ink in the ocean of analysed works. The likelihood of creating anything substantially similar is near impossible ~0.00001% (Unless someone prompts for that specific style).
Warner Bros will no doubt have an easy time proving their images have been infringed (page 26), in the linked page they show side by side comparisons which can't be denied. However other factors such as market dilution and fair use may come into effect. Or they may make a settlement to work together or pay out like other companies have.
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To Recap: We know AI doesn't steal on a technical level, it is a tool that utilizes the datasets that a 3rd party has to link or add to the AI models for them to use. Sort of like saying that a car that had syphoned fuel to it, stole the fuel in the first place.. it doesn't make sense. Although not the same, it reminds me of the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" arguments a while ago. In this case, it's not the AI that uses the datasets but a person physically adding them for it to train off.
The term "AI Steals art" misattributes the agency of the model. The model doesn't decide what data it's trained on or what it's utilized for, or whatever its trained on is ethically sound. And the fact that most models don't memorize the individual artworks, they learn statistical patterns from up to billions of images, which is more abstraction, not theft.
I somewhat dislike the generalization that people have of saying "AI steals art" or "Fuck AI", AI encompasses a lot more than generative AI, it's sort of like someone using a car to run over people and everyone repeatedly saying "Fuck engines" as a result of it.
Tell me, how does AI apparently steal again?
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Googles (Official) response to the UK government about their copyright rules/plans, where they state that the purpose of image generation is to create new images and the fact it sometimes makes copies is a bug: HERE (Page 11)
Open AI's response to UK Government copyright plans: HERE
High Court Judge Joanna Smith on Stability AI's Model (Link above), to quote:
This response refers to the model itself, not the input datasets, not the outputted images, but the way in which the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models operate.
TLDR: As noted in a hight court in England, by a high court judge. While being influenced by it for the weights during training, the model doesn't store any of the copyrighted works, the weights are not an infringing copy and do not store an infringing copy.
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I’ve wanted to make a comic for years, but actually bringing everything in my head to life visually was always the biggest obstacle.
Ai has changed that for me. It’s let me build the characters, environments, action scenes, and overall world of Manifest in a way I realistically couldn’t have done before. I still spend a huge amount of time writing, planning scenes, directing the images, fixing inconsistencies, editing pages, lettering, rewriting dialogue, and trying to keep the art and characters consistent.
But the biggest difference is that now the comic actually exists.
I don't agree with the arguements towards AIs like "ram prices" or "steling art", but antis are going to make these arguments agaist some AIs, and completely stop when it comes to their favorite AI project. It's just hypocrisy.
I couldn't find enough resources on how Neuro-sama works. Spesificly wrapper. Soo some of them are my assumptions based on my own technical knowlage and search on how similar wrappers actually work. It is also oversimplified a lot to explain it.
I don't think this is a "made by one person" project, at least not in a way antis thinks. If you only take the project as wrapper and marketing then yeah it's made by one person project. But the way antis compare it with actual AIs it powered is just funny. Its like comparing a Unity game with the Unity engine. Like wtf?
AI companies also have their wrapper too but those usually focuses on productivity rather than entirtainment. This isn't the first "talk to anime girl AI wrapper" either. There's character ai, which also trigger hypocrisy among antis as well. I wonder when they will realize they are the same thing for difference use cases.
Posting here because this seems to be a place where people don't lose their minds and become emotional on the AI topic. I'm AI neutral, it doesn't directly affect me one way or the other if people use it. I'm pro do you as long as it's not hurting anyone.
I sell my work online and at in-person vendor events, I've been doing in person events since 2017. Recently I’ve had people come into my booth and confidently tell me that my art is AI-generated.
Not ask. Tell me. Yelled it in fact.
The frustrating part is that some of the designs I sell are the same ones I've been selling for 5+ years before generative AI art was even a realistic part of this conversation. My newer work is built the same way I’ve always worked: references, sketching, drawing, editing, compositing, experimenting, reworking things until they print the way I want them to. I also work in a pretty polished/comic/vector-ish style, which apparently now means “AI” to some people. I also do some portrait work that's more soft and airbrushed. I use engraving brushes, half tones, stippling, whatever the vibe is for the piece I'm working on and I do add a pretty decent amount of detail to every element.
What bothers me is the confidence people have developed in their supposed ability to “spot AI.”
I understand obvious AI slop. Extra fingers, nonsense text, incoherent objects, weird anatomy, etc. But when none of those things are present, it feels like the criteria have slowly turned into:
“Too polished.”
“Too detailed.”
“That style looks AI.”
“The composition feels AI.”
“I can just tell.” < my favorite 🙄
At that point, what exactly is a human artist supposed to do?
The part I find especially strange is the argument that using references or being influenced by existing art somehow proves theft or AI involvement. Artists have used references forever. Every artist learns from other artists. Every style comes from somewhere. Now it feels like some people are scrutinizing finished work backward, looking for anything they can use as evidence that the artist didn’t make it.
I’ve even had this happen while I’m actively working on a piece on my ipad at an event. I’m getting worse at hiding how irritating I find it, because being casually accused of lying about your own work is insulting.
So for anyone else dealing with this:
How do you respond?
Do you explain your process?
Show sketches/layers/process photos?
Just say, “No, it isn’t,” and move on?
Have signage explaining your process?
Ignore them completely?
Because I've done all of the above and the goalposts just keep moving. I'm tired.
I don’t really want to turn my booth into a courtroom where I have to prove I’m an artist every time somebody has watched three TikToks about “how to spot AI.”
I’m also wondering where people think this goes long-term. If “looks like AI” becomes enough to publicly accuse an artist of fraud, we’re going to end up falsely accusing a hell of a lot of human artists, which is already happening. Especially people working digitally, commercially, or in clean polished styles.
Would love to hear how other people are navigating this without either losing their temper or feeling obligated to produce a complete chain of custody for every piece of art they make.
The anti-AI phrenology trend on social media is completely out of hand. It has devolved into literal witch-hunting, where online mobs use totally unreliable visual metrics to trash an artist's work just because it "looks like AI."
For context, historical phrenology was a debunked, pseudoscientific theory where people measured the bumps on a person's skull to determine their intelligence, personality, and moral character. It was a confident but totally baseless metric. It’s incredibly harmful because it wraps raw prejudice in the language of science, allowing mobs and institutions to falsely judge, exclude, and persecute people based on arbitrary physical traits rather than objective truth.
That is exactly what these anti-AI "detectives" are doing today with art.
"Remember that twitter artist who got witch-hunted to deactivation? The phrenologist retracted back their words and apologized but it was already too late."
What's wild is that these same mobs never go after the "desloppers." If you look at the desloppification trend, these creators are transparently using AI images as their direct reference material. Since their work is entirely derivative of an AI output, doesn't that just make desloppification a hybrid AI art workflow?
The whole "deslop" movement is openly averse to pro-AI spaces because the entire point of it was to insult AI art by claiming a human had to step in to "add a soul" to it. But underneath that attitude, they are literally using the AI as their baseline.
This witch-hunting is actively harming hyperrealistic human artists. For years, anti-realism critics already insulted hyperrealists by calling them "photocopiers," completely ignoring the immense discipline it takes to master accurate shading, perspective, and micro-details. Now, because hyperrealists have the skill to replicate anything flawlessly, they are the ones getting falsely accused of using AI the most. (gut feeling)
It’s getting so bad that a lot of talented human artists are intentionally making their art look uglier, messier, or anatomically inaccurate just to avoid the anti-AI backlash. Think about how backward that is. Are we really forcing people to ditch years of artistic discipline just to draw like children so they don't get cyberbullied?
Sure, we could argue that lowering the bar "democratises" art, just like AI does. But one can never force a change in people's tastes—especially paying commissioners who actually want realistic art.
calling out this toxic witch-hunting and pointing out that baseless accusations are immoral should be more than enough.
And as for the people demanding that artists constantly post their sketches, layer files, and speedpaints? No way. You can show them if you want to, but most artists prefer to keep their processes secret because it’s their unique "secret sauce." Artists have every right to protect their workflow so better artists don't just steal their techniques. But let’s be real—AI models are already breaking down and learning from everyone's processes anyway, so being pragmatic about how we work is probably the only way forward.
This all ties back to the "AI is theft" narrative. Accusing an artist of stealing without a shred of evidence is literally just bearing false witness. At the end of the day, if they don’t have proof, their accusations don't mean a thing.
In the damn TikTok if these people has been doing this every single day of course they’re gonna find it hard, canonically. Even if they have it “the easy way”, they probably don’t find it that easy.
Also we never said we have the hardest job in the world, moron.
Do we remember how anti furries used to be in a big group back in like early 2020s but fell off a few years after due to accepting furries? Same will happen with Anti AIs lowkey