{"id":179043,"date":"2025-06-12T18:36:12","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T18:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/179043\/"},"modified":"2025-06-12T18:36:12","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T18:36:12","slug":"history-in-the-making-disney-and-midjourney-lawsuit-finally-gives-us-the-legal-definition-of-shrek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/179043\/","title":{"rendered":"History In the Making: Disney and Midjourney Lawsuit Finally Gives Us the Legal Definition of Shrek"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you were wondering what the legal definition of Shrek<\/a> is, the Disney \/ Universal lawsuit against AI company Midjourney confirms exactly what it is.<\/p>\n

According to court documents posted to BlueSky:<\/a> “Shrek’s namesake character is a large, bald, dull-green ogre with a broad, round face, brown eyes, and highly distinctive trumpet-shaped ears. Shrek typically wears crude clothing consisting of a canvas-like shirt, a leather vest, and brown leggings.”<\/p>\n

That little descriptor \u2014 as hilarious and accurate as it actually is \u2014 is one of the excellent tidbits to come out of the landmark lawsuit. Yesterday, Disney joined forces with Universal to sue Midjourney for copyright infringement, stating that the AI-powered image generator is a \u201cbottomless pit of plagiarism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shrek is one of the properties that is being cited as part of Midjourney\u2019s infringement offenses, as well as Marvel characters, Star Wars characters, Despicable Me\u2019s iconic Minions, and others. According to a BlueSky user who combed through the docs, there are over 30 comparisons between studio artwork and Midjourney outputs<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Further, according to the docs, this suit has been percolating since November 2024<\/a>, when Midjourney was served a demand letter \u2014 essentially an attempt to settle an issue out of court \u2014 from Disney, but they allegedly did not respond and then proceeded to develop more models that infringed on existing copyrights. Universal recently served the company another demand letter at the end of May, which means the studios finally decided to hit the gas pedal on taking down Midjourney.<\/p>\n

Generative AI is one of the hottest topics within the video game and entertainment industries, which have both suffered massive layoffs in recent years. Generative AI thus far has drawn criticism from players and creators due to a mix of ethical issues, rights issues, and AI\u2019s struggles to produce content audiences actually enjoy.<\/p>\n

In March, social media platforms were flooded with AI-generated Studio Ghibli-inspired images<\/a> as part of a trend sparked by the launch of OpenAI\u2019s new GPT\u20114o image generator. It caused a vociferous debate that resurfaced anti-AI comments from creator Hayao Miyazaki.<\/p>\n

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you were wondering what the legal definition of Shrek is, the Disney \/ Universal lawsuit against AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":179044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-179043","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114671844343566415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179043","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=179043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/179044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}