Disney and Universal sue AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement

A Darth Vader costumed character poses at the Hasbro and Amazon Star Wars interactive Imperial March experience at the Empire State Building on Thursday, March 21, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, file)

NEW YORK — Disney and Universal have filed a copyright lawsuit against popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney on Wednesday, marking the first time major Hollywood companies have entered the legal battle over generative AI.

Filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, the complaint claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios to generate and distribute “endless unauthorized copies” of their famed characters, such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and the Minions from Despicable Me.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” the companies state in the complaint.

The studios also claimed the San Francisco-based AI company ignored their requests to stop infringing on their copyrighted works and to take technological measures to halt such image generation.

Midjourney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.

“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”

Major AI developers don’t typically disclose their data sources but have argued that taking troves of publicly accessible online text, images and other media to train their AI systems is protected by the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law.

The studio’ case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI platforms — such as OpenAI, Anthropic — in San Francisco and New York.

Shawn Chen, The Associated Press