From the course: Midjourney: Tips and Techniques for Creating Images

Understanding Midjourney copyright - Midjourney Tutorial

From the course: Midjourney: Tips and Techniques for Creating Images

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Understanding Midjourney copyright

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- [Instructor] In this video, we're going to discuss rights and copyright as it refers to images that are produced with Midjourney. Let's start off by doing a prompt here. We're going to do the /help, and after we press the return key to bring up some basic resources, let's go to the Getting Started Midjourney documentation. Here, just below the quick start guide, you'll see some of the most viewed articles, and the first thing that we want to do is go to the subscription plans. Once you get to this page, scroll down to plan comparisons, and to the very bottom. We're going to talk to you about usage rights. Companies that make more than a million dollars in revenue, you have to purchase the Pro plan in order to go by these general terms. Now, let's just look at this a little bit deeper. We're just going to click on this Terms of Service button, and under Terms of Service, if we scroll down a little bit, we'll find the Copyright and Trademark section. One is it covers the rights that you actually give to Midjourney. Just keep in mind that other users can copy and paste your public text prompts in order to use it for their own generative artwork workflow. Now, in terms of your rights is that, essentially, you own all of the assets you create with the services, now to the extent possible under the current law. It mentions that this excludes upscaling the images of others, which images remained owned by the original asset creators. In this respect, Midjourney is not actually making any claims or warranties with respect to the current law and how it might apply to you, so again, you're going to want to consult a lawyer depending on how you would like to use the work commercially. Now, this is applicable to most paid accounts, except if you're not a paid member, which it mentions down here, as well as if you are employee of a company that makes over a million dollars, you've got to purchase the Pro plan. It also makes a note just regarding that this is an open community, and when you post something publicly, people are able to access prompts as well as the commands that you've entered in for that imagery. Now I'm here on Reuters, which brings up some AI-created images that lost copyright protection, which was a test for Midjourney earlier in 2023. An artist created a graphic novel, and in this graphic novel, they displayed several images that were produced by Midjourney. What was determined was the artist did have copyright for the parts of the book that she wrote and arranged, but the images produced by Midjourney, she did not have the copyright for. So in keeping this in mind, generative AI art is very fresh, and I'm sure that we're going to be seeing additional cases on these regards, how you can use these images commercially. So don't forget to check Midjourney's own terms, as it deals with copyright, not to mention additional laws in the US as well as internationally.

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