Disney and Universal have sued Midjourney, accusing it of creating a copy of their copyrighted characters
American movie studios Walt Disney Company and NBCUniversal have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Midjourney. The plaintiffs claim that Midjourney’s image generation service creates an “infinite number of unauthorized copies” of copyrighted characters.
Disney and NBCU seek unnamed maximum statutory damages from the defendant, an accounting of Midjourney’s revenues derived from the alleged license violations, and an injunction against further violations.
Plaintiffs offered an example of Midjourney’s illegal service operation. A user sends a simple text request asking for an image of Darth Vader in a certain setting or performing certain actions. In response, the service creates and displays a “high-quality downloadable image” of this “Star Wars” character, copyrighted by Disney.
A similar example was cited with characters from NBCU’s “Minions” franchise.
The lawsuit also describes the use of copyrighted materials to train AI models. Midjourney plans to launch a video service in the future, which would exacerbate the use of the movie companies’ intellectual property, the plaintiffs point out.
Disney and NBCU argue that Midjourney could have implemented safeguards to prevent its service from creating such images, but failed to do so. The movie companies asked Midjourney to stop the illegal practice before taking legal action. However, the AI company did not respond to this appeal, releasing new versions of its service that began generating even better images.
