Blade Runner 2049 AI Lawsuit Rules That Elon Musk’s Tesla Can Still Be Sued for Copyright Infringement

Things are getting too meta in this dystopian landscape. Blade Runner 2049‘s production company Alcon Entertainment has sued Tesla and Elon Musk for allegedly feeding stills from the Warner Bros. picture to an AI image generator to create promotional material for the car manufacturer. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Alcon’s trademark claim, while dismissed, has prompted a re-examining of the peculiar similarities between Blade Runner 2049 and Tesla’s ad campaign that allows smaller cases of copyright infringement to continue against the company.

The image in contention is a still of Ryan Gosling’s Officer K standing in the orange-hued wasteland expanse next to a futuristic car. The suit from Alcon claims that the still was used to create “unlicensed promotional materials” while including film distributor Warner Bros. Discovery for “facilitating the partnership” in a violation of Alcon Entertainment’s trademarks.

The judge ruled in favor of Warner Bros. and Tesla, which had partnered up for the robotaxi’s unveiling. At the event, Tesla boss Elon Musk debuted an image of his Cybercab displayed in an eerily similar ad that looks like the scene in question from Blade Runner 2049. Tesla denied the use of trademarked materials; Alcon had accused the company of using an AI image generator to strip imagery from the scene from 2049 without using licensed permission. The grounds for the ruling were that Alcon was only working off “information and belief ” in this copyright infringement case, according to THR.

The technicality may have won the battle, however Alcon revealed in the court case that it had denied Tesla the use of Blade Runner 2049 hours before the presentation in question. The judge ruled, “Given the tight timeframe Musk and Tesla were working with in light of their last-minute request—and the resulting last-minute denial—to make use of BR2049, it is not at all implausible for Plaintiff to allege on information-and-belief that they made use of an AI image-generator to come up with the finished product.”

Most of the claims can therefore move forward—except for one which had initially invoked the Lanham Act (aka the Trademark Act of 1946, which Alcon had claimed Tesla violated through its barring of false association), as Musk only mentioned the film once during the event, but not in a way that implied legitimacy to Alcon’s accusations.

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