this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Nobody can stop you.
But because our copyright laws are so overreaching you probably are breaching copyright.
It's just not worth a company suing you for the financial "damages" they've "suffered" because you drew a character instead of buying a copy from them.
Certain exceptions exist, not least "De Minimus" and education.
You can argue that you're learning to draw. Then put that drawing in a drawer and probably fine.
But's pretty clear cut in law that putting it even on your own wall is a copyright breach if you could have bought it as a poster.
The world doesn't work that way but suddenly AI doing what an individual does thousands of times, means thousands times the potential damage.
Just as if you loaded up a printing press.
De Minimus no longer applies and the actual laws will get tested in court.
Even though this isn't like a press in that each image can be different, thousands of different images breaking copyright aren't much different to printing thousands of the same image.
Unfortunately I have studied this.
So we'll just have to decide to agree to disagree and hope neither ends up on the wrong side of the law.
Like I say. Copyright is based upon damage to the copyright holder. It's quite obvious when that happens and it's hard to do enough as an individual to be worth suing.
But making a single copy without permission, without being covered by any exemptions, is copyright infringement.
Copy right. The right to copy.
You don't have it unless you pay for it.
If your country is a signatory to the international copyright treaties with most of the Anglosphere (Like the EU, US, AUS, NZ). Then that is not correct.
You cannot draw anything.
It's just never worth suing you over.
A crime so small it's irrelevant is almost a legal act. But it's not actually a legal act.
Much like @Ross_audio, I have studied this intently for business reasons. They are absolutely right. This is not a transformative work. This is a direct copy of a trademarked and/or copyrighted character for the purpose of generating revenue. That's simply not legal for the same reason that you can't draw and sell your own Spider-Man comics about a teenager that gains the proportional strength and abilities of a spider, but you can sell your own Grasshopper-Man comics about a teenager that gains the proportional strength and abilities of a grasshopper. As long as you use your own designs and artwork. Because then it is transformative. And parody. Both are legal. What Midjourney is doing is neither transformative nor parody.
Midjourney Inc. is in San Francisco, so U.S. law is what applies here.