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Subject: Re: A bottomless pit of plagiarism
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2025 11:49:50 +1200
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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.