Los Angeles: Entertainment giants Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal have filed a joint copyright infringement lawsuit against Midjourney, the AI image-generation platform, alleging it unlawfully replicated and distributed countless images of their most iconic characters.
Filed in the federal district court in Los Angeles on Wednesday, the lawsuit accuses Midjourney of building its generative capabilities by “pirating” the studios’ creative libraries and generating images resembling protected characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me, without authorization.
The complaint calls Midjourney a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” asserting that the platform has made “innumerable” unauthorized copies of characters that represent the intellectual and creative assets of the studios. Spokespersons for Midjourney have not yet responded to media requests for comment.
Disney’s Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer, Horacio Gutierrez, emphasized the company’s stance on AI 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, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
NBCUniversal’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Kim Harris, echoed the sentiment, stating the company is suing 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 adds to a growing number of legal battles between content creators and AI firms, as the entertainment industry grapples with how emerging technologies are trained and deployed. As generative AI tools grow in popularity and accessibility, questions around consent, intellectual property rights, and ethical use are rapidly coming to the forefront.
This legal action could have far-reaching implications for the AI industry, particularly regarding how AI models source training data and reproduce proprietary content.
