Hollywood Takes a Stand: The Copyright Showdown with Midjourney

Disney and Universal have filed a complaint with the US District Court for the Central District of California against the AI company Midjourney, calling it a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The plaintiffs also include affiliated companies such as Marvel, Lucasfilm, and DreamWorks.

This is reportedly the first major lawsuit brought by Hollywood studios against an AI company.

As Time Magazine notes,

For the last few years, Hollywood has refrained from entering the [AI] fray, while sending mixed messages about AI. During contract negotiations in 2023, AI was a major source of contention between unions like SAG-AFTRA and producers, who advanced a “groundbreaking AI proposal” involving the use of “digital replicas” to fill out the backgrounds of film scenes.

According to the complaint,

For more than 100 years, Disney and Universal have delighted audiences around the world by investing in and fostering American creative innovation and producing some of the greatest motion pictures and fictional characters of all time. Midjourney, however, seeks to reap the rewards of Plaintiffs’ creative investment by selling an artificial intelligence (“AI”) image-generating service (“Image Service”) that functions as a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works.

The complaint calls Midjourney the “quintessential copyright-free rider” for

helping itself to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters—without investing a penny in their creation.

As the complaint notes,

Disney’s and Universal’s vast libraries of intellectual property include some of the most well-known movies, television shows, and fictional characters of all time. For Disney, these include the Star Wars franchise, the Marvel Comics properties, Pixar films, the 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox) library, and Disney’s namesake animated features. Disney’s unforgettable copyrighted characters span decades of works across a wide range of genres and tastes: Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, Lightning McQueen from Cars, Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Sully from Monster’s Inc., Marvel’s Iron Man, and Homer Simpson from The Simpsons, to name just a few.

Universal’s characters include Shrek and the Minions.

According to the plaintiffs,

Midjourney’s Image Service was developed using innumerable unauthorized copies of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and it operates by reproducing, publicly displaying, making available, and distributing additional infringing copies and derivatives of those works. If a Midjourney subscriber submits a simple text prompt requesting an image of the character Darth Vader in a particular setting or doing a particular action, Midjourney obliges by generating and displaying a high quality, downloadable image featuring Disney’s copyrighted Darth Vader character…

The plaintiffs claim that they’ve requested Midjourney to cease infringing or, at the very least, to implement technical measures used by other AI services to prevent the generation of infringing materials.

For example, according to the complaint, Midjourney already uses technological measures to prevent the distribution and public display of certain images and artwork.

Midjourney’s “Community Standards” list four categories of prompts that Midjourney doesn’t allow:

• “Content that disrespects, harms, or misleads about public figures or events,”
• “Hate speech, explicit or real-world violence,”
• “Nudity or overtly sexualized images,” and
• “Imagery that might be considered culturally insensitive.”

Also, other generative AI services use copyright protection measures. For example, ChatGPT’s policies now restrict the generation of images in the style of Studio Ghibli.

The plaintiffs say that Midjourney (which allegedly earned $300 million in 2024) ignored requests to use such measures to prevent the generation of copies of their IP.

Midjourney reportedly had nearly 21 million users as of September 2024. Subscriptions to its platform range from $10 to $120 per month.

As the complaint states,

In response to the simple request (often referred to as a “prompt”) asking to see “Yoda with lightsaber, IMAX,” Midjourney accessed the data about Disney’s Copyrighted Works that is stored by the Image Service and then reproduced, publicly displayed, and made available for download further copies of Disney’s Yoda.

The complaint includes dozens of examples of Midjourney-generated images of other plaintiff characters.

According to the complaint,

Midjourney had to copy Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works in order for it to be able to subsequently disseminate reproductions and derivatives of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works as outputs. Midjourney’s unauthorized copying of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works to train its Image Service infringes Plaintiffs’ copyrights in their Copyrighted Works.

Also, say the plaintiffs,

Once the training process is complete, due to Midjourney’s massive copying of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works, and as a direct and intentional result of Midjourney’s development and training, Midjourney’s Image Service generates reproductions and derivatives of Plaintiffs’ Copyrighted Works.

The plaintiffs cited an article called Generative AI Has A Visual Plagiarism Problem Experiments With Midjourney And DALL-E 3 Show A Copyright Minefield in IEEE Spectrum that showed that Midjourney generated images that allegedly infringed on the plaintiffs’ copyrighted characters even when the prompt didn’t specifically request them.

For example, a prompt for “yellow 3d cartoon character with goggles and overalls” produced characters that were recognizably Minions.

The 109-page complaint lists many of the franchises and characters owned by the plaintiffs, and provides copies of images of the characters generated using Midjourney.

Other simple prompts, such as “popular movie screencap-- ar 1:1-- v 6.0,” also produced images from the plaintiffs’ movies.

The complaint alleges that Midjourney’s upcoming Video Service

will generate, publicly display, and distribute videos featuring Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted characters. Midjourney has already begun training its Video Service, meaning that Midjourney is very likely already infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works in connection with its Video Service.

According to the plaintiffs,

• Midjourney’s bootlegging business model and defiance of U.S copyright law are not only an attack on Disney, Universal, and the hard-working creative community that brings the magic of movies to life, but are also a broader threat to the American motion picture industry, which has created millions of jobs and contributed more than $260 billion to the nation’s economy.

The plaintiffs are asserting causes of action for both direct and secondary copyright infringement.