{"id":176526,"date":"2025-06-11T20:07:13","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T20:07:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/176526\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T20:07:13","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T20:07:13","slug":"disney-and-universal-sue-ai-company-midjourney-for-copyright-infringement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/176526\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging that the San Francisco\u2013based AI image generation startup<\/a> is a \u201cbottomless pit of plagiarism\u201d that generates \u201cendless unauthorized copies\u201d of the studios\u2019 work. There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits<\/a> against AI companies winding through the US court system\u2014including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney<\/a> in 2023\u2014but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.<\/p>\n

The complaint includes dozens of images that purportedly demonstrate how Midjourney can conjure images featuring the studios\u2019 intellectual property. One image depicts Yoda from Star Wars holding a light saber, which it says was made by inputting the prompt \u201cYoda with lightsaber, IMAX.\u201d Another shows that typing \u201cThe Boss Baby\u201d as a prompt allegedly resulted in an image of an animated child in a tuxedo closely resembling the protagonist of Universal\u2019s The Boss Baby franchise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an extremely significant development,\u201d says IP lawyer Chad Hummel, who sees the compilation of images in the complaint as compelling evidence that \u201cthe output is not sufficiently transformative.\u201d Most AI companies facing lawsuits have argued that they are protected by the \u201cfair use\u201d doctrine, which allows for use of copyrighted works in certain circumstances; one of the main questions the courts ask is whether new work is \u201ctransformative,\u201d or adds a new meaning or message, when they make the fair use determination.<\/p>\n

Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University, believes Midjourney will have a harder time making a fair use case than previous AI defendants.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason it\u2019s different is that Disney directly attacks the output of the model. It doesn\u2019t just use a few cherry-picked examples to prove that the model was trained on its works,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be very difficult for a court or a jury to accept that it is transformative to take 1,000 pictures of Darth Vader and use them to produce even more pictures of Darth Vader.<\/p>\n

The lawsuit alleges that Disney and Universal have asked Midjourney to \u201cadopt technological measures\u201d to prevent its image generators from producing infringing materials, but that the company \u201cignored\u201d their demands. Additionally, it alleges that Midjourney \u201ccleaned\u201d copies of Universal and Disney\u2019s work during the training process, which \u201cnecessarily included creating more copies of the materials.\u201d Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,\u201d Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement. \u201cBut piracy is piracy, and the fact that it\u2019s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Midjourney, like many other generative AI startups, trained its tools by scraping the internet to create large datasets of images, rather than seeking out specific licenses. In a 2022 interview<\/a> with Forbes, CEO David Holz openly discussed the process. \u201cIt\u2019s just a big scrape of the internet. We use the open data sets that are published and train across those,\u201d he said. \u201cThere isn\u2019t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they\u2019re coming from. 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging that the San Francisco\u2013based AI image generation startup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":176527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1942,37936,823,77,498,6854,2452,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-176526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-copyright","10":"tag-disney","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-hollywood","13":"tag-intellectual-property","14":"tag-media","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114666539753624221","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/176527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}