Elsa from Frozen is one of the dozens of characters featured in side-by-side image comparisons included in Disney and Universal’s copyright lawsuit against Midjourney.
Photo: US District Court in Los Angeles
When it comes to the alleged copyright infringement of their characters, Disney and Universal aren’t willing to let it go. The Hollywood heavyweights joined forces to sue Midjourney on June 11, alleging that the AI image generator has been “generating endless unauthorized copies” of their intellectual property. This marks the first time that major Hollywood studios have waded into ongoing legal battles concerning AI. Various headlines have declared that the outcome of this lawsuit could “shift the future of entertainment,” “determine whether studios survive,” and “reshape the battle over AI and copyright.” Below, what to know about the 110-page complaint.
Midjourney is a San Francisco-based start-up that generates AI images for users who pay for a subscription (monthly prices range from $10 to $120). Type in what you want to see on the company’s website or its Discord bot, and Midjourney will produce an image. If you’re not satisfied with the result, Midjourney community members have made plenty of tips-and-tricks videos about how to come up with more effective prompts.
Launched publicly in 2022, Midjourney is now a prominent name in the AI text-to-image industry. According to Disney and Universal’s lawsuit, it made $300 million last year. The company boasts the world’s largest Discord server at more than 21 million members (Viggle.ai is in second with around 4.3 million members). Like many of its competitors, Midjourney’s model is trained on data scraped from across the internet. The company did not seek permission from living artists or copyright holders in advance, founder David Holz acknowledged to Forbes in 2022. “There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from,” he said. “It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry.”
Midjourney has steadily worked to increase the quality of its image service; its latest model, Version 7, released in April. The company has also been exploring video-generation features, according to an announcement shared on its Discord on January 8. Disney and Universal’s lawsuit claims that Midjourney has already started training its “soon-to-be-released commercial AI video service.” There’s been speculation that Midjourney’s video abilities could launch as soon as this June, though the company has yet to share an official date.
The two Hollywood giants allege that Midjourney is engaging in “calculated and willful” copyright infringement. Their 110-page lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and obtained by Courthouse News, describes Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that “functions as a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies” of Disney’s and Universal’s famous, copyrighted characters. To back this argument up, the complaint includes dozens of side-by-side screenshot comparisons of Midjourney outputs and images of copyrighted characters including Shrek, Elsa, the Minions, Iron Man, Darth Vader, the Simpsons, and more. “We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content,” NBCUniversal general counsel Kim Harris said in an email to the New York Times.
Disney and Universal claim that Midjourney could easily put an end to the alleged “theft and exploitation” of their intellectual property, given that it already has features to prevent the distribution and public display of certain things like violence and nudity. But the studios say that Midjourney is focused on its profits and has refused to filter Disney and Universal’s copyrighted works out of its service, even after being sent cease-and-desist letters. Their lawsuit argues that Midjourney’s actions threaten to “upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.” The “financial investment, creativity and innovation” behind Disney’s IP is only possible because of copyright laws that “give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works,” Disney’s legal counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, similarly suggested in a statement to Courthouse News.
The lawsuit seeks damages and Midjourney’s profits in “an amount according to proof” — or alternatively, statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work. (It’s unclear which option would be more costly.)
Disney and Universal are also requesting an injunction that would prevent Midjourney from offering both its image service and its upcoming video service “without appropriate copyright protection measures to prevent” infringement. The studios want this case to be decided by a jury trial.
Midjourney did not immediately respond to Vulture’s request for comment. But when asked during a June 11 conference call with users whether the legal action would threaten the start-up’s future, Holz reportedly was optimistic. “I can’t really discuss any ongoing legal things because the world isn’t cool like that, but I think Midjourney is going to be around for a very long time,” the founder said, per the Associated Press. “I think everybody wants us to be around.”
When hit with lawsuits, the AI industry has often argued that training generative models on copyrighted material is protected by the U.S.’s “fair use” doctrine, which allows people to use copyrighted material without permission under certain circumstances. These protections can sometimes even apply to for-profit uses; the Supreme Court famously ruled in 1994 that 2 Live Crew’s commercial parody of Roy Orbison’s song “Pretty Woman” counted as fair use. Courts are supposed to consider four different factors when determining fair use, and one common question that comes up in these decisions is whether the use is “transformative” and adding a new meaning or expression compared to the original. Midjourney could echo the other AI companies that have defended their actions as fair use, though the visual similarities in the side-by-side comparisons in Disney and Universal’s lawsuit seem to preemptively challenge the idea that Midjourney’s user prompts are leading to new, transformed creations.
It’s a fair question, given that a desire for protections against AI was one of the reasons that WGA and SAG-AFTRA went on strike against Hollywood studios in 2023. Writers and actors have joined authors, artists, and other creatives in raising concerns about AI replacing their jobs and using their work or likenesses without consent or compensation. So does Disney and Universal’s lawsuit represent a shift wherein Hollywood studios are now going to be firmly against AI? Not necessarily. The use of generative AI may already be more embedded in Hollywood than we realize, according to a recent New York Magazine report that explores how studios are using the technology to cut costs and save time when making movies and TV.
Several prominent celebrities have entered public partnerships related to AI: Darren Aronofsky’s AI-focused studio Primordial Soup is producing short films in collaboration with Google’s DeepMind, while James Cameron has joined Stability AI’s board of directors. Meanwhile, Natasha Lyonne co-founded Asteria Film Co., which is an example of an AI studio with generative models that are trained on licensed content.
Even Disney itself has said that it sees potential in AI — it just doesn’t agree with how Midjourney is using it. “We are bullish on the promise of A.I. technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” Gutierrez, Disney’s general counsel, said in an email to the New York Times. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an A.I. company does not make it any less infringing.”
Midjourney is obviously not the only generative AI company doing business right now. (Studio Ghibli-esque AI art took over social media in March when an update to ChatGPT relaxed OpenAI’s rules around what images users could generate, for example.) A ruling on Disney and Universal’s lawsuit could set an important precedent for industry-wide regulation of AI.
Legal action over AI is nothing new; Midjourney itself was named as one of the defendants in a class-action lawsuit brought by artists in 2023 over alleged copyright infringement of their work. Multiple authors filed lawsuits in 2023 over the alleged copyright infringement of their work by AI companies, and three major music labels sued AI start-ups in 2024 for allegedly copying their songs to train generative models. There are currently dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI firms in the U.S. court system, Wired reports. And this is also an international issue — opening arguments for Getty Images’s copyright infringement case against Midjourney competitor Stability AI began in London on June 9. Will courts on either side of the pond set legal limits on what AI technology can do with copyrighted characters, movies, music, writing, photos, and more? This lawsuit against Midjourney could be part of the journey to getting a long-awaited answer.
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