The Verge has reported that
The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members’ content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that “CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement,” since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters.
Japan’s government formally asked OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork.
As The Verge noted,
This isn’t the first time one of OpenAI’s apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either — the highlight of GPT-4o’s launch back in March was a proliferation of “Ghibli-style” images. Even Sam Altman’s own profile picture on X is currently a portrait in a style reminiscent of Studio Ghibli.
One user on X (formerly known as Twitter) said about this:
The whole Studio Ghibli AI trend honestly gives me second-hand embarrassment knowing how hard Hayao Miyazaki has fought to retain the identity of his films and how many of you are this willing to make a farce out of decades of artistry because you don’t actually value it.
OpenAI later released a System Card stating:
The model can generate images that resemble the aesthetics of some artists’ work when their name is used in the prompt. This has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community. In response, we opted to take a conservative approach with this version of 4o image generation, as we learn more about how 4o image generation is used by the creative community. We added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.
We recently published a blog about Sora. As we wrote, the Wall Street Journal reported in September that
OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear…
According to The Verge,
Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora’s opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, “under Japan’s copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections.”
Copyright only protects works of authorship – not “style.” However, artists have argued that generative AI tools not only infringe their copyright but also violate their trademarks when such tools copy their distinctive styles.
As Fashion Industry Law explained about a case involving Stable Diffusion,
The visual artists-plaintiffs claimed that the style of their artworks is a form of trade dress protected by federal trademark law under the Lanham Act. Their complaint noted specific features of their respective works that represent their unique styles. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants’ use of “CLIP-guided diffusion” technology in a trade dress database, where the artists’ names are used in prompts to generate trade dress output, is likely to confuse the public with the artists’ trade dress because of their similarity.
The Hollywood Reporter noted about the Stable Diffusion case that
The court also stressed that Midjourney produced images similar to artists’ works when their names were used as prompts. This, along with claims that the company published images that incorporate plaintiffs’ names on its site showcasing the capability of its tool, served as the basis for allowing trademark claims to move forward. It said that whether a consumer would be misled by Stability’s actions into believing that artists endorsed its product can be tested at a later stage of the case.
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