Disney and Universal sue AI image generator Midjourney
Disney and Universal are suing popular AI image generation platform Midjourney, claiming it infringes on the copyright of a number of well-loved characters.
Midjourney is an AI-driven program that creates images from typed prompts. The suit, filed in Los Angeles on Wednesday, claims Midjourney scraped the content libraries of both Disney and Universal in order to train its service to create “innumerable” copyright-breaching images.
(Midjourney)
These include variations of characters such as Darth Vader and Yoda from Star Wars, Shrek, Bart Simpson, Elsa from Frozen, Buzz Lightyear, and Iron Man.
The studios allege Midjourney ignored previous requests to stop infringing upon their copyright, and have since improved the AI to produce higher quality imagery that breaches copyright law. The suit calls the infringement “calculated and willful.”
“By helping itself to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters — without investing a penny in their creation — Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit alleges.
Disney and Universal are asking for a preliminary injunction preventing Midjourney from copying their works, as well as unspecified damages. The suit claims the company made US$300m in revenue last year.
“Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing,” Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, said in a statement.
NBCUniversal executive vice president and general counsel Kim Harris said the suit aimed to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us, and the significant investment we make in our content.”
(Midjourney)
Last year, Midjourney was named in a similar copyright infringement lawsuit filed against several AI companies, including Stability AI and DeviantArt.
A California federal judge found both direct and induced copyright infringement claims brought by ten artists named in the suit to be plausible, with the class action trial scheduled for September, 2026.
As of the time of writing, Midjourney was still accepting prompts with highly valuable intellectual property and turning out high-quality characters. Example prompts displayed on this page are “Darth Vader and Elsa from Frozen duel with light sabres” and “Shrek meets Yoda”.
Midjourney CEO David Holz said in a 2022 Forbes interview the company’s dataset was built from “a big scrape of the Internet”, and that it didn’t seek consent for works under copyright.
“There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from,” Holz 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. There’s no way to find a picture on the Internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.”
Keep up to date with the latest in media and marketing
Got a tip?
Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
Linkedin
Have your say