Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence firm Midjourney, accusing the company of violating copyright law by using protected material to train its software and create new images.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in a California federal court, marks the first major legal challenge from a Hollywood studio against an AI company over image generation. In the filing, the studios described Midjourney as “the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.”
Midjourney, launched in 2022, generates images using data scraped from across the internet. That process, the lawsuit alleges, includes the unauthorized use of copyrighted content owned by Disney, Universal, and others.
According to the complaint, Disney sent Midjourney a cease-and-desist notice last year, which the company acknowledged but never responded. Universal sent its own notice last month and received no reply.
“We are bullish on the promise of A.I. technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” said Disney’s general counsel Horacio Gutierrez, as quoted in The New York Times. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an A.I. company does not make it any less infringing.”
Kim Harris, general counsel for NBCUniversal, added in a separate statement to the outlet, “We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages and a court order to block Midjourney from launching its planned video generation service unless proper copyright safeguards are implemented.
