Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon’s copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.
Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so “although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did.” Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla’s cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.
“Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood,” Alcon’s complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.
The “Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk,” the complaint said.
Musk, the lawsuit said, is “problematic,” and “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon’s lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged “massive economic theft.”
According to the complaint,
Elon Musk’s image:
Infringes on the copyright of this image from Blade Runner 2049:
In my opinion, I hope that this lawsuit fails. I know that the movie industry already follows similar practices to what Musk has done. If a studio goes to a certain musician and the price is too high to include their music in the show, they’ll go to a different artist and ask them to create a song that sounds like the song that they originally wanted.
If this lawsuit succeeds it’s going to open the door for them to sue anyone that makes art that’s remotely close to their copyrighted work. All they will need to do is claim that it “might have been created by AI with a prompt specifying our work” without actually having to have any proof beforehand.
I’m terrified how fear of AI is suddenly making tighter copyright laws more popular.
Yeah, don’t know what to think. Is this closer to copying a melody from a certain ballad or using the same chords that no-one owns and have been reused through decades to write a ballad… 🤔
It’s one thing to just do a similar melody by accident, and entirely another to ask the artist if you could use the melody, get explicitly denied, then go on and use that melody anyway, changing a single less relevant note in there.
I think everyone gets this distinction innately, we just get caught up in the copyright law aspect of this, which I’m not claiming isn’t relevant. It’s just Musk being a clear scumbag, whichever way you lean on the lawfulness side of it.
Edit: What I mean to say is, it’s fairly clearly morally corrupted and wrong, but it’s not so immediately clear to accept as such in this reality, where declaring so might have consequences beyond this instance.
If it wasn’t clear from my comment, I’m not defending Musk. Don’t care much about him.
I just don’t envy the judge that has to consider this. I’m a musician, and find it complicated to judge such issues in the musical landscape.
Was replying more in the general, not specifically to you, but yeah. I’m a musician too myself, and have a wide range of other creatives in my inner circle, and this whole copyright topic is extremely hard. But I think we mostly can ignore that aspect when we consider the moral side as-is. A lot less complicated that way. Again, more in the general sense for all the comments in this post, sorry to drop it all here.
No worries. Thanks for your input. 🍻
I don’t get your comment, first it’s an argument that says, others are doing fucked up wrong things, therefore Elon is justified doing it too.
In the second paragraph you fear monger that anyone who creates anything remotely similar will be sued with no proof , but this case literally spells out that Elon first asked for the image, then used one similar anyway when denied, then mentioned the source in question twice in his speech.
It’s literally nothing like the thing you fearmonger about, how your comment got 17 upvotes is beyond me.
Yeah, no. This is like suing someone because their picture of the sunset looks similar to yours. Obviously, the image is supposed to resemble that movie - I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that - but I don’t see any copyright infringement here.
Username checks out, you are right, except if you first ask the sunset for their picture and they refuse to give it to you you come up with an eerily similar one, even with the person in the foreground wearing the same clothes
So it would have been fine if they hadn’t asked? I don’t get your point. Like I said: I don’t think anyone denies that it’s supposed to look like it was from the movie. It’s not though. It’s similar but is not the same. I don’t see what the copyright infingement here is supposed to be. I don’t think you can own the idea of a man in a trenchcoat overlooking a city with orange filter on it.
I mean, yeah it might have been, not because that makes it okay but because of a lack of attention on the subject. Then again he also might have gotten sued after the fact like Trump with his campaign trail music he keeps using without permission.
However, Elon did ask first, and was met with the response of “no, we absolutely do not want our product associated with you or your business in any fashion.” So he then carried on to create a barely legally distinct derivative which easily calls to mind the iconic scene in question, and then name drop Blade Runner in the accompanying speech.
Imagine for a moment, you write Bill Gates and ask him if you can use his likeness for advertisement. He tells you no, absolutely not, go kick rocks. So instead you have your local AI whip you up a character - Bull Gotes, a thin, white haired, elderly, bespectacled Caucasian man who made a lot of money on his computers, which he calls Macrosoft. This might be permissible as parody, but I don’t think you’re going to win a court case if you use it in business advertising and Bill decides he has something to say about it.
I see what you’re saying, but I think in this case it’s different enough from the original artwork that, if this were to go through in court, it would open the floodgates for a ton of similar lawsuits and set a bad precedent. They absolutely acted in bad faith here, as it’s immediately obvious which scene they’re mimicking, but I just don’t see enough similarity for copyright infringement. It’s quite different from Trump using actual songs from artists without permission - this isn’t the actual scene from the movie.