Disney and Universal The San Francisco-based AI Image Generation startup has filed a lawsuit against the Mid Journey, claiming it was a “stolen plagiarism pit” that produces “infinitely fraudulent copies” of the studio's work. There have already been dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies that are involved in the US court system. This includes visual artists from a class action lawsuit brought against Mid Journey in 2023 — but this is the first time a major Hollywood studio has jumped into the fight.
The complaint includes dozens of images showing how Midjourney can recall images featuring studio intellectual property. One image depicts Yoda from Star Wars holding a light sabre. It says that this was created by typing the “Lightsaber, IMAX.” Another thing is said to have quickly entered “Boss Baby” and brought the image of an animated tuxedo child that resembles the protagonist of Universal. Boss' baby Franchise.
“It's a very important development,” says IP lawyer Chad Hummel. Chadummel sees compilation of the complaint's image as compelling evidence that “the output is not transformative enough.” Most AI companies facing lawsuits claim they are protected by the doctrine of “fair use” that allows for the use of copyrighted works in certain circumstances. One of the main questions courts ask is whether the new job is “transformative” or whether new meanings or messages will be added when making fair use decisions.
Matthew Thug, a law professor at Emory University, believes that Mid Journey will have a hard time creating fairer use cases than previous AI defendants.
“The reason that's not the case is that Disney directly attacks the output of the model. It's not just using some examples of cherry picks to prove that the model is trained in the piece,” he says. “It will be very difficult for courts and ju apprentices to accept that it is transformative for them to take 1,000 photos of Darth Vader and use them to create even more photos of Darth Vader.
The lawsuit alleges that Disney and Universal asked the Mid Journey to “take technical measures” to prevent the image generator from producing infringing materials, but the company “ignored” their requests. It also claims that Mid Journey “cleans” copies of Universal and Disney's work during the training process. Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
“We are bullish about the promises of AI technology and are optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further enhance human creativity,” Disney's legal advisor Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement. “However, the fact that copyright infringement is copyright infringement and is carried out by AI companies does not infringe it.”
Like many other generation AI startups, Midjourney trained the tool by scraping the internet to create large datasets of images rather than looking for a specific license. In a 2022 interview with Forbes, CEO David Holtz openly discussed the process. “This is a big scuff on the internet. We use publicly open data sets and train them,” he said. “There's actually no way to get 100 million images and find out where they came from. If there's embedded metadata about copyright owners and so on, that would be cool. But that's not the case. There's no registry.”
