🌋 Elon Musk Sued Over Robotaxi Promo by Blade Runner 2049
posted 22 Oct 2024
The producer of Blade Runner 2049, a sci-fi film produced in 2017, sues Elon Musk and Tesla. The reason - promotional materials used for the company’s cybercab robotaxi.
In a lawsuit, filed on October 21, 2024, Alcon Entertainment claims Tesla’s team fed images from the movie into AI to generate unlicensed materials.
Alcon Entertainment states that, beyond copyright and commercial concerns, they do not wish to be affiliated with Musk or any of his companies due to his extreme political views and occasional hate speech.
The company also sued Warner Bros. on October 10, when the Robotaxi was live streamed worldwide from the Warner Bros. Discovery lot in Burbank, California.
Alcon says in the lawsuit that the defendants requested permission to use an image from Blade Runner 2049, but were rejected. Despite this, they allegedly created a fake image based on the original.
Scene from Blade Runner 2049 Trailer and a picture from Tesla’s presentation. Source: Euronews
The similarity between the movie scene and Tesla’s image is striking. In the movie trailer, the character K, played by Ryan Gosling, walks from his autonomous flying car into a ruined city.
Tesla’s image shows a man in a trench coat standing before orange-colored ruins.Musk even referenced the movie in his speech, saying:
You see a lot of sci-fi movies where the future is dark and dismal, where — it’s not a future you want to be in. So, you know, like, I love Blade Runner,” adding, “Maybe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse