Disney and universal A lawsuit has been filed against Midjourney, accusing San Francisco’s AI image generation startup of “bottomless stolen” that produces “endless unauthorized copies” of the studio’s work. There have been dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies tangled through the U.S. court system, including a class action lawsuit filed against Midjourney in 2023 — but it is the first time that a big Hollywood studio has jumped into the competition.
The complaint included dozens of images that allegedly showed how Midjourney summoned studio intellectual property images. An image depicts Yoda in Star Wars with a light sword, which it says was made by typing “Yoda with Lightsaber, Imax”. Another shows that typing “Boss Baby” allegedly led to an animated child in a tuxedo, very similar to the protagonist of Universal Pictures Boss baby Franchise.
“This is an extremely important development,” said Chad Hummel, an IP lawyer. “Most AI companies facing litigation believe they are protected by the “fair use” doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted works in certain situations; one of the main questions the court asked is whether the new works are “transformative” or whether new meanings or information are added when making a fair use determination.
Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University, believes that Midjourney will have more time in fair use cases than previous AI defendants.
“It’s different because Disney directly attacked the output of the model. It not only uses some examples of cherry picking to prove that the model is trained on its work,” he said. “It’s difficult for a court or a jury to take 1,000 photos of Darth Vader and use them to make more photos of Darth Vader.
Disney and Universal have asked Midjourney to “take technical measures” to prevent its image generator from producing infringing materials, but the company “ignores” their request, the lawsuit said. Additionally, it claims Midjourney “cleaned” copies of Universal Pictures and Disney’s work during the training process, which “must include creating more copies of the material.” Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“We are optimistic about AI technology and how we can be used responsibly as a tool for further human creativity,” Disney General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that AI companies have done it doesn’t make it less than infringement.”
Midjourney, like many other AI-generating startups, trained its tools by scratching the Internet to create large sets of image data instead of seeking specific permissions. In a 2022 interview with Forbes, CEO David Holz publicly discussed the process. “It’s just a lot of scratches on the internet. We use open datasets that have been published and trained on these,” he said. “In fact, there is no way to get a hundred million images and know where they are from. It would be cool if the images were embedded with metadata like the copyright owner. But it’s not the same thing; there’s no registry.”
