Disney and Universal sue Midjourney

Walt Disney and Universal filed a joint copyright infringement complaint against Midjourney in the US District Court for the Central District of California, the first time major Hollywood studios had sued an AI image generator. The 110-page complaint accused Midjourney of training its models on the studios’ copyrighted works and of operating what it called a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” alleging the service would reliably generate recognisable, unlicensed images of characters including Darth Vader, Elsa, Bart Simpson, Shrek and the Minions when prompted for them, with visual examples included as exhibits. The studios sought statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work — an exhibit listed more than 150 works, implying potential damages above $20 million — plus an injunction against further generation of their characters.

Midjourney’s public defence tracked the position it and other image generators had taken in earlier suits, including Getty Images’ 2023 case against Stability AI: that its models learned general visual concepts from a large training corpus rather than storing or copying specific works, and that any resemblance to a copyrighted character in an output was an incidental consequence of that learning rather than direct reproduction. The complaint anticipated and rejected that defence, arguing Midjourney had previously filtered some copyrighted-character prompts and had since relaxed those restrictions, which it characterised as evidence of knowing rather than incidental infringement.

The suit added movie studios to a docket of AI copyright litigation that had, until then, been dominated by authors, news publishers and music rightsholders — Getty against Stability, The New York Times against OpenAI, and record labels against Suno and Udio among them — and it targeted image generation specifically rather than text. Warner Bros. Discovery filed a similar suit against Midjourney three months later, making it the third major studio to do so and adding weight to the industry’s effort to establish that training an image generator on copyrighted characters is not fair use.