Re: A bottomless pit of plagiarism

On 2025-06-15 00:06:06 +0000, Dimensional Traveler said:

On 6/14/2025 4:49 PM, Your Name wrote:

On 2025-06-14 19:05:53 +0000, Tim Merrigan said:

On 6/14/2025 8:28 AM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Fri, 13 Jun 2025 17:00:53 -0400, Cryptoengineer
<petertrei@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6/13/2025 11:24 AM, Paul S Person wrote:

On Thu, 12 Jun 2025 15:49:55 -0000 (UTC), Don <g@crcomp.net> wrote:
 

"Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney over images"
 <https://www.google.com/search? q=midjourney+"a+bottomless+pit+of+plagiarism">
 PKB??

 The link is to a Google search result. "PKB" does not occur on it, at
least not here.
 Perhaps it would help if you specified the actual article (there are
at least four, possibly more) in which "PKB" occurs.
 Most of what I am finding for "PKB" is from chemistry. I have doubts
about that being relevant.

 PKB ->  Pot. Kettle. Black.

 That at least makes sense. If Disney/Pixar is in the plagiarism
business, that is.
 Not that I am expressing an opinion about whether or not Midjourney's
AI is plagiaristic, BTW.

 Disney has long been in the business of taking old classics and copyrighting them as their own.  Many of them not technically plagiarism, since the originals were never copyrighted.  Snow White and Cinderella, to name two off the top of my head.
 Winny the Pooh, they bought the rights to, I don't know about Pinocchio or James and the Giant Peach, though since Dahl was still alive when they made JatGP, I assume there was some sort of negotiation.

 Winnie the Pooh itself is no longer copyright (expired in 2022), so Disney doesn't own those now. Hence the idiotic "Blood and Honey" horror movie version made recently. Disney does still own the copyright to their version of Winnie the Pooh though.
 Similarly, Disney doesn't own the copyrights to the older stoires of Cinderlla, Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, etc. Disney only owns the cpyrights for their own versions of those.
 Roald Dahl refused to sell the movie rights for any of his works after the "saccharine, sappy, and sentimental" mistreatment of the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie with Gene Wilder. After he died, his widow sold the James and the Giant Peach movie rights to Disney (she offered them to other movie companies as well, but accepted Disney's agreement) - she said Roald would have liked the movie, which is doubtful. In 2021 the Dahl family sold the copyrights for all his works to Netflix in 2021 for around US$500million.

 Well, if you're going to sell out at least sell out BIG!

US$500million is peanuts really (probably not even enough to make a movie of just one of Dahl's books). It cost Disney US$4.05billion to get their hands on the, admittedly far bigger, Star Wars franchise.  :-)
Roald Dalh's books are still huge popular and the rights could easily have been sold for a lot more.