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.”
In my laic opinion no criteria for fair use is fulfilled here, so it would be really hard to argue that it would set some harsher precedent that exists, in real life proving someone wanted what looks like something else will be hard to prove as they would need either the exact prompt and then prove what the author meant by that point, IANAL but AFAIK proving what someone was thinking when entered the prompt will be pretty difficult or it will have to be something obvious like “make it a slightly different version of that iconic blade runner picture”
Here the court will have documents showing that they tried to get permission to use the picture when denied they used something that’s essentially the same thing while also livestreaming themselves mentioning what they are ripping off, so it’s a much different case to some random person generating a similar picture.
This to me is very close to the Kanye New Slaves case, feel free to listen to it then go on youtube and checkout “gyöngyhajú lány” while you will find that kanyes version is slightly different, he entirely ripped the song off, then tried get permission afterwards, which he didn’t get and had to settle for undisclosed millions.