Blade Runner 2049 producers sue Elon Musk, Tesla, Warner Bros. Discovery over robotaxi images

Elon Musk has respondedto a lawsuit launched against him by a production company forBlade Runner 2049 over allegations of copyright infringement.

"That movie sucked," Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX,postedon the X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter,Tuesday, responding to news of the lawsuit.

Alcon Entertainmentis suing Tesla and CEOElon Musk, as well asWarner Bros. Discovery, alleging they used scenes from the film without permission to generate promotional materials for the launch of Tesla's self-driving robotaxi.

In a lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. federal court in California, Alcon Entertaintment accusedMuskand Tesla of feeding sequences from the film into an image generator driven by artificial intelligenceto create materials used duringMusk's robotaxi unveiling on Oct. 10.

The lawsuit accuses Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discoveryof direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringementand false endorsement.

During his presentation, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner 2049.

"You know, I love Blade Runner,but I don't know if we want that future," he said.

"It was hardly coincidental that the only specific Hollywood film which Musk actually discussed to pitch his new, fully autonomous, AI-driven cybercab was BR2049 a film which just happens to feature a strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car throughout the story," reads the lawsuit.

Tesla partnered with Warner Bros.for the unveiling,which was done from a studio lot, according to the lawsuit. At the presentation, Musk arrived in a cybercabbefore showing an image of a male figure wearing a trench coat as he surveys the abandoned ruins of a city bathed in a misty, orange light. In the upper left corner, the words "Not This" appear superimposed on part of the sky.

"Musk tried awkwardly to explain why he was showing the audience a picture of BR2049 when he was supposed to be talking about his new product. He really had no credible reason," the lawsuit says.

The presentation "was clearly intended to read visually either as an actual still image from BR2049's iconic sequence of K [Ryan Gosling's character] exploring the ruined Las Vegasor as a minimally stylized copy of one," the lawsuit says.

Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery did notreply to requests for comments from CBC News at the time of publication.

Alcon Entertainment saidit had specifically denied a request from Warner Bros. Discovery to use material from the film at the launch event.

The production companydidn't want to be associated with Tesla or Musk because of what it called "Musk's massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behaviour, which sometimes veers into hate speech," the lawsuit says.

"The financial magnitude of the misappropriation here was substantial," the lawsuit says.

"Alcon has spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars building the BR2049 brand into the famous mark that it now is. Prior actual BR2049contracts linking automotive brands to the picture have had dollar price tags in the eight figures."

The company, which is in talks with other automotive brands for partnerships on a Blade Runner 2099 television series currently in production, claims in the lawsuit that the defendants' conduct is "likely to cause confusion among Alcon's potential brand partner customers."

Alcon Entertainment is seekingunspecified damages, as well as a court order barring Tesla from further distributing the disputed promotional materials.