Tesla and Warner Bros. Win Part of Lawsuit Over AI Images from ‘Blade Runner 2049’

A legal fight between Alcon Entertainment (the company behind Blade Runner 2049) and Tesla took a big step this week. A federal judge gave Elon Musk and Warner Bros. Discovery a partial win but also said that Tesla may have broken copyright rules.

This lawsuit started when Tesla used images that looked a lot like scenes from Blade Runner 2049 during a fancy event for their robotaxi last year. At the event, Elon Musk showed up in a “cybercab” and revealed an image of a man in a trench coat standing in a ruined city covered in orange mist.

Alcon said this image looked almost exactly like a scene from the movie with Ryan Gosling’s character walking through a destroyed Las Vegas.

Alcon claimed that Tesla used AI to copy parts of the movie and make new images for promotion without permission. The company also said that Warner Bros. helped with this by working with Tesla on the event.

U.S. District Judge George Wu dismissed the trademark part of the lawsuit but kept some of the copyright claims going. He said Alcon may be right to think Tesla used AI to copy parts of the movie.

He wrote, “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.”

Basically, Tesla had asked Alcon to use images from the movie right before the event, but they were told no. That’s why the court believes it’s possible Tesla quickly used AI to create something that looked like the film instead.

The judge allowed most of the copyright claims against Tesla to continue. But he dropped most of the claims against Warner Bros., except for one—contributory copyright infringement.

That means Alcon believes Warner Bros. may have helped Tesla in a small way, but the judge said the studio didn’t really control what Tesla was doing. “There is nothing indicating that Warner had such a supervisory/controlling position or role vis a vis Tesla and Musk,” the judge wrote.

Tesla and Warner Bros. also won when it came to trademark accusations. Alcon said Musk used the words “Blade Runner” in a way that could confuse people, but the judge didn’t agree. He said Musk wasn’t pretending that Tesla made the movie. “Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars,” he wrote. “Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business.”

The judge said Alcon might get a chance to improve its copyright claims but cannot try again on the trademark part. He explained that fixing those trademark claims would be “futile.”

So for now, the case continues—but only the copyright part. The rest is done.