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*deep, exhausted sigh*

While I absolutely agree that giving Disney even more direct control over the US copyright system is a terrible idea, in this case I actually do think this is a "let them fight" situation, not something to go fearmongering about, and there are...two and a half reasons, actually

1. The lawsuit isn't saying "if you ask it to draw a picture of Po from Kung Fu Panda it can," it's saying "if you ask it to draw a picture of Po from Kung Fu Panda it will recreate an identifiable frame from the movie." That is, it isn't (as they claim) "learning" what Po from Kung Fu Panda looks like, it's saving a huge database of images and applying metadata to them, and if you can figure out how to ask for exactly what it's saved you can get it to return that to you basically unchanged. It is quite literally passing off a copy of the original as its own work.

2. This can seem paradoxical because I'm sure you've been told that it doesn't matter if you "meant" to infringe on a copyright, but the thing is that intent actually matters a whole lot in the law, and Midjourney saying repeatedly that they didn't bother about copyright is not going to work in their favor here. The fact that Midjourney is a for-profit company making a product they're selling is also going to be a factor.

(Yes, this does mean that posting fanart with a sarcastic "fuck Disney I do what I want" is going to be a riskier proposition; there is a reason older fans blanket their fan work in disclaimers.)

(Yes, it also means that selling fanart is probably going to be harder again; I know this is important to a lot of people so I don't want to be dismissive about it but I've always had complicated feelings about selling fanart for a variety of reasons and it is also the aspect of fan work that is on the shakiest legal ground already.)

3. The legal definition of a transformative work is actually pretty intuitive. An artist whose work consists of painting replicas of single frames from movies can make a case for the transformative nature of their work in a way a mechanical generator just can't. Hell, the time and effort that go into doing that kind of recreation is a significant part of the artistic value, and genAI is explicitly designed to get rid of those exact factors! Midjourney is going to have to argue either that their tool can have artistic intent (it cannot) or that an algorithmic average of a bunch of copyrighted images is transformative enough to count as art, even when the algorithm was not intentionally designed. (And that's the best case scenario; there's also the possibility that Midjourney is basically a search engine that will make up answers if it can't find the right one, and a specific IP is just the easiest way for it to find the answer pre-existing.)

(I will say, and note that I do not and have never worked in machine learning, but I do know a bit about code and a bit more about the tech industry and I've been fascinated by machine learning failures for a long time, and my understanding is that the programmers at Midjourney might not actually know which one it's doing! There is legal precedent for an algorithm itself to be protected by copyright, and for works created by algorithm to be considered artistic; how a judge will interpret "we tried to make an algorithmic generator and we gave it a bunch of legally protected material as fodder and even though we don't know exactly what it's doing with that legally protected material its output is original and transformative, we swear" is another question.)

Now granted, it's entirely possible for a judge to come back with a much broader ruling that makes it virtually impossible to post fanart online, or that whatever the decision, Disney decides that it's license to start sending cease and desist letters to individual tumblr users again, but that's the thing: fandom, fanart specifically, largely exists because copyright holders have come to understand that persecuting the people they rely on to give them money is not a great look.

Is it possible this is very, very bad? Sure. But genAI already is very, very bad, and Disney+Universal are maybe the only team that have both the cultural and legal clout to really challenge it right now. Whichever side wins it's probably going to be bad in some way for the rest of us, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy watching them take chunks out of each other.

Link to thread

Link to news story

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Gussie Fink-Nottle would do fucking numbers on this site

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guys. i really like you. it's nice to be on this dashboard together

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at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

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Quote of the day

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Hey everyone, remember that being sick or healing from injuries is a hard time for your body. You have to eat a lot and lay still and be kind to yourself! [large neon sign that says HYPOCRITE descends from the ceiling and points at me] Hey what the heck what's this who put that there

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The revolution needs you to brush your teeth.

This ask went hard, but you are correct.

The revolution needs you to brush your teeth. Crippling pain and debt from having bad and rotted teeth makes you easier for the oligarchy to control.

The revolution needs you to brush your teeth.

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after a lifetime of hearing about aragorn but not reading the books or watching the movies, genuinely nothing could have prepared me for his actual introduction. the hobbits picked this man out of a dumpster. he is a textbook softspoken angst prince and he is covered in dirt and he probably smells so bad. he’s the coolest man alive and is so casual about it. his number one skill is Knowing Where They Are and his number two skill is Having A Horrible Destiny That Torments Him. tolkien got it in one i’m afraid aragorn son of arathorn you are the guy of all time

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oh wow! hey if you take pills check this out. new medicine taking meta just dropped.

according to these models, out of the 4 tested postures, the best position to digest pills is laying on your right side. standing upright has a similar time to laying in your back at twice as much as laying on the right side, and laying on the left side is the slowest by far.

laying on right side: pill dissolves in around 10 minutes.

standing: pill dissolves in 23 minutes. laying on the back has a similar time.

laying on left side: pill dissolves in up to 100 minutes.

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0096877

definitely worth a lot more research.

if you want your medicine to kick in fast, try laying on your right side! if you want your medicine to kick in slower, try laying on your left side.

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decentralize and clean up your life!!!

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

last updated: march 18th 2025

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The central joke of the Ulysses Ogre meme hinges on the Ogre holding themselves to unreasonable standards by expecting to fully grasp one of the most famously difficult works of the 20th Century after only a single reading, which just doesn't work if you substitute your favourite video game, because frankly, your favourite video game is not Ulysses – but to be fair, the overwhelming majority of books are not Ulysses either. There's probably a video game somewhere out there that's as textually challenging as Ulysses, and it's probably some random-ass RPG Maker game from 2006 with an author whose name is a dick joke and a present fandom of approximately eleven people.

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Good morning TMA fandom,

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stuffed animal contest

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Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction

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a lot of people could stand to start viewing the nakba and the holocaust as a continuum rather than as competitive binaries

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death of the author yeah whatever but death of the fandom is so integral to enjoying legitimately anything like that is just a necessary step to take in ur head always. do not let them affect the text in any way exterminate them all with ur death ray. they r not real and cannot hurt u

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at this point i only feel safe in the company of internet perverts . these are like the only people left who you can count on to not let the fascism enter their body when they encounter a weird person