Disney and Universal sued a prominent AI startup on Wednesday for copyright infringement, leaving Hollywood lately involved in an increasingly fierce battle against AI generation
The film company sued Midjourney, an AI image generator with tens of millions of registered users. The 110-page lawsuit argues that Midjourney “helps himself obtain countless copyrighted works to train its software, which allows people to create images (and soon videos) that “blatantly merge and copy famous characters from Disney and Universal Studios.”
“Midjourney is the typical copyright free rider and the bottomless pit of bottomless theft,” the companies said in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.
Midjourney was unable to comment immediately.
AI startups like Midjourney, launched in 2022, train their software with data scratched from the internet and elsewhere, often without compensating creators. This practice leads to authors, artists, record labels and news organizations, etc. (The New York Times has sued Openai and its partner Microsoft for copyright infringement. Openai and Microsoft have denied these claims, saying their actions are “fair use.”)
But Disney and Universal Studios were the first major Hollywood studios to file a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Creative workers in the entertainment capital are getting more and more frustrated by the studio silence of the matter. “They did not protest AI companies’ theft of this copyrighted material, which is their surrender that they are still on the off-site,” Meredith Stiehm, president of the American Writers Association of Western Writers, told the Los Angeles Times in February.
Midjourney lawsuits show that Disney and Universal are the two most powerful traditional entertainment companies, and they have been buying time. When invading prominent figures such as Darth Vader, Minions, “Frozen” Princess, Shrek and Homer Simpson in detail attacks on Midjourney, the lawsuit is like a shot across the entire bow and arrow, usually shooting at AI companies.
The AI theft that studios will generate pose a problem, “threatening to subvert the underlying incentives of U.S. copyright laws in movies, television and other creative arts.” According to the latest economic data from the Hollywood lobby Film Association, the U.S. film and television business provides 2.3 million jobs to 2.3 million jobs.
“We are optimistic about AI technology’s commitment and how to responsibly be used as a tool for further human creativity,” Disney’s general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said in an email. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that AI companies have done it doesn’t make it less than infringement.”
“We have taken this action today to protect all the hard work of artists who have entertainment and inspired us and our heavily invested in content,” Kim Harris, general counsel for NBCuniversal, said in another email.
Disney sent a “stop and stop” notice to Midjourney last year, and the AI company did not respond except to admitting receipts, according to the lawsuit. Universal Pictures sent a similar notice last month and has not received any response in any form.
The lawsuit requires Midjourney to pay the losses, but does not include exact monetary demand. Disney and Universal Pictures also hope the judge will prevent Midjourney from “providing upcoming video services without proper copyright protection.”
Midjourney is one of the most popular text-to-image generators: users type what they want to see and spit the robot back into the image after a few seconds. (Competrators include stability AI and DALL-E developed by Openai.) Midjourney sells monthly subscriptions, ranging from $10 for the base plan to $120 for the “Mega”, depending on processing speed, among other factors. Last year, it generated revenue of about $300 million, up from $50 million in 2022.
Midjourney has created vivid images of copyrighted materials for at least a year and a half in the news. For example, the New York Times reported in February 2024 that typing “animated toys” into Midjourney led to images that stood out from Buzz Lightyear and other “Toy Story”, a Pixar-made movie owned by Disney.
