Comment by llbbdd

Companies care about material damages in practice. I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that in that case, the artist drawing and selling the work is infringing (to a degree, because this seems to be a case Disney et al doesn't care about) but that if you take their work and publish and promote it and sell it, YOU become Disney's problem. If the wind and rain and erosion and time and God managed to produce a perfect post-Steamboat-Willie Mickey Mouse in the desert sand, visible from space, that wouldn't be infringement until you monetized it, called it Mickey Mouse and charged people to see it. A lot of the entities trying to get their piece of Infringement Pie seem to think their authority and their works are in the first position here instead; that my newfound capability to generate a Mickey Mouse from scratch on a whim affects their pockets, when in fact we're back to a variant of the classic piracy argument - I was not ever going to pay for it under any condition. If I decide this weekend to have one of the robots help me publish To Kill a Mockingbird Part 2, then sue me into the ground.