"Piracy Is Piracy": Disney Sues Midjourney for Massive Copyright Violation

Yahoo

a day ago

Disney and NBCUniversal — a pair of media behemoths behind franchises ranging from "Star Wars" and "Toy Story" to "Minions" and "Shrek" — are suing AI company Midjourney, accusing it of enabling copyright infringement on a massive scale through its AI image generator tech.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in a California district court today, the two Hollywood juggernauts accused the firm of ignoring its previous requests to stop violating their intellectual property rights.
"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the scathing complaint reads, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
It's a major escalation in the fight between copyright holders and AI firms, a battle that has been brewing for years. Per Axios, it's the "first legal action that major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company."
And it's not just the use of image generators; generative AI writ large has triggered a barrage of lawsuits, with media companies accusing the likes of OpenAI and Google of training their large language models on their materials without fair compensation.
Those disputes have turned into a major pain point for the AI industry, despite surging enthusiasm for the tech.
Considering the sheer size of both Disney and Universal — Disney is the third largest media company by market cap in the world — Midjourney could soon be in a world of hurt.
Disney, in particular, has a long track record of closely guarding its enormous cache of intellectual property.
"Our world-class IP is built on decades of financial investment, creativity and innovation—investments only made possible by the incentives embodied in copyright law that give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works," said Disney's chief legal compliance officer, Horacio Gutierrez, in a statement.
"We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity," he added. "But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing."
The lawsuit explained in an example how Midjourney users could easily request a picture of the Disney-owned "Star Wars" character Darth Vader in a "particular setting or doing a particular action," and the AI "obliges by generating and displaying a high-quality, downloadable image."
That kind of loose approach to copyright has been an open secret for quite some time. In January 2024, noted AI critic Gary Marcus and film industry concept artist Reid Southen warned in a piece for IEEE Spectrum that tools like Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E3 could land them in a "copyright minefield."
The pair found that it was "easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts related to commercial films," including well-known Marvel superheroes, Nintendo's Super Mario, and Disney's Darth Vader.
Disney and Universal are framing their legal action as a way to "protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us," said NBCU executive VP and general of counsel Kim Harris in the statement.
Given the lack of a clear legal precedent, it'll be fascinating to watch the lawsuit unfold over what's likely to turn into a years-long courtroom battle.
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