Disney and NBCUniversal sue Midjourney for AI copyright infringement

Disney and NBCUniversal have filed the first major Hollywood lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney, accusing the company of copyright infringement for allowing users to create images of characters like Darth Vader and Shrek. The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks a significant escalation in the entertainment industry’s battle against generative AI companies over intellectual property rights.

What you should know: The studios describe Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that enables users to generate what they call “AI slop”—personalized images of copyrighted characters.

• Disney Enterprises, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Universal City Studios Productions, and DreamWorks Animation joined forces in the legal filing.
• The complaint includes dozens of visual examples showing Midjourney’s outputs alongside original copyrighted characters like Yoda, Wall-E, Stormtroopers, Minions, and How to Train Your Dragon characters.
• Users can simply type prompts like “Darth Vader at the beach” and receive “high quality, downloadable” images featuring Disney’s copyrighted character.

The studios’ allegations: The complaint claims Midjourney downloaded copyrighted content from the Internet using “bots, scrapers, streamrippers, video downloaders, and web crawlers” to train its AI model.

• Beyond allowing users to create these images, the studios argue that Midjourney actively promotes copyright infringement by displaying user-generated content featuring copyrighted characters in its “Explore” section.
• The studios allege that Midjourney has technical protection measures available that could prevent outputs featuring copyrighted material but has “affirmatively chosen not to use copyright protection measures to limit the infringement.”
• They cite Midjourney CEO David Holz admitting the company “pulls off all the data it can, all the text it can, all the images it can” for training purposes.

What they’re saying: Industry executives are taking a strong stance against what they view as digital piracy.

• “Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing,” said Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez.
• “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,” said Kim Harris, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president and general counsel.

The bigger picture: This lawsuit represents a new front in Hollywood’s conflict over AI, with studios now taking on tech companies over intellectual property concerns.

• According to Axios, Disney and NBCUniversal attempted to address the issue with Midjourney before filing suit, but the company “continued to release new versions of its Image Service” with what Holz allegedly described as “even higher quality infringing images.”
• While actors and writers have fought to protect their name, image, and likeness from studio exploitation, now the studios themselves are confronting tech companies.
• The legal action follows similar moves in other creative industries, with more than a dozen major news companies suing AI company Cohere in February over copyright concerns, and visual artists suing Midjourney in 2023.

Who’s not involved yet: Other major studios, including Amazon, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Sony, and Warner Bros., have not joined the lawsuit, though they share membership with Disney and Universal in the Motion Picture Association.