Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, the artificial intelligence (AI) company known for generating images based on text prompts. The lawsuit was submitted to the US District Court for the Central District of California and spans 110 pages. The entertainment giants claim that Midjourney is copying their copyrighted characters without permission.
According to the lawsuit, Midjourneyâs AI tool can generate images that closely resemble popular figures like Elsa from Frozen, Darth Vader from Star Wars, Minions from Despicable Me, Iron Man, Shrek, and many others owned by Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, DreamWorks, and more.
The plaintiffs argue the San Francisco-based startup trained its AI using a massive amount of online images, including protected content from movies and shows. They claim that the system now lets users produce near-exact copies of their characters, which they believe is illegal and harmful to their business. They also say that Midjourney ignored repeated demands to stop this activity. The lawsuit claims Midjourney refused to put in place filters or guardrails to block copyrighted material from being reproduced.
Additionally, in the complaint, Disney and Universal warn that the company is planning to launch video tools soon, which could allow people to create moving images or scenes based on their characters, something they see as a major threat to the film industry. The lawsuit demands that Midjourney stop these practices immediately, pay damages, and take steps to prevent future copyright violations.
This is not the first time Midjourney has come under fire for allegedly misusing artists’ work to train its AI systems. Last year (2024), a California judge said that a group of 10 artists had a valid case against Midjourney, Stability AI, and others for copying and storing their artwork without permission. Therefore, the lawsuit was allowed to move forward and is still ongoing. The issue gained more attention as Midjourneyâs CEO, David Holz, said in a 2022 Forbes interview that they created their image database by doing ‘a big scrape of the Internet’.
While this is one of the first major legal cases brought by Hollywood studios against an AI image generator, copyright infringement cases are becoming common with AI firms. For example, Reddit recently initiated legal proceedings against Anthropic (the AI startup founded by former OpenAI senior leaders). The social community platform claims Anthropic unlawfully used its vast user-generated content to train its AI models, including the chatbot Claude. According to the firm, the AI startup accessed its platform over 100,000 times since July 2024, despite public claims that its bots had been blocked. Even major AI giants like OpenAI and Meta are also facing similar lawsuits over the unlicensed use of copyrighted material to train AI models.
