Midjourney has asked a federal US court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose how they use artificial intelligence, returning a legal volley first fired by the entertainment giants.
The studios sued Midjourney, accusing it of facilitating widespread infringement of their copyrighted characters—a potentially devastating legal challenge for the popular AI image generator. Per Variety, Midjourney has claimed “fair use” and now argues that the studios are employing the same AI features that originally landed it in court.
On June 15, a magistrate judge had denied Midjourney’s request for broad information about its behind-the-scenes AI tools, finding it irrelevant to the question of whether Midjourney was infringing on the studios’ copyrights.
In response, Midjourney’s attorneys filed a motion this week asking Judge John Kronstadt to overturn that decision. “If plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses,” Midjourney attorney Bobby Ghajar wrote, as first reported by Variety. Midjourney is seeking unprecedented transparency on the studio’s use of AI, including business plans, training datasets, and model weights—essentially, the system’s learned “instinct” for generating responses from training data—and even board meeting presentations.
The motion continues: “If Plaintiffs are developing image-generating AI models — trained on unlicensed, third-party copyrighted data — for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.”
Meanwhile, the studios’ lead attorney, David Singer, called Midjourney’s motion a “fishing expedition” intended to distract from its legal exposure. In a statement, Singer said the studios “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows” and to halt the distribution and creation of works containing unauthorized copies of their characters, invoking the fair use tenets of U.S. copyright law. The case centers on iconic characters including Superman, Scooby-Doo, and Bugs Bunny, which the studios allege are being systematically reproduced.
Midjourney has consistently courted copyright controversy since launching its image-generation tools to the public. In 2023, three artists filed a class-action complaint against the company, alleging that its system was trained on billions of scraped images and could reproduce artworks in their styles without consent or compensation. The suit described the defendants—Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt—as “21st-century collage tools that violate the rights of millions of artists,” though experts have pushed back against the generalization. The case is still moving through the Northern District of California, with some claims dismissed and others proceeding.
Midjourney made unflattering headlines again the following year, when artists published a 24-page Google Sheet identifying 16,000 artists whose works the company allegedly used as training data for its AI image generator. The list included seminal names in modern and contemporary art, from Pablo Picasso to Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol to Yayoi Kusama, as well as more unexpected entries, including the work of a six-year-old child who participated in a 2021 fundraiser for Seattle Children’s Hospital.
The list was included as part of an amended class-action complaint against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, along with a 455-page submission of supplementary evidence filed in November 2023.
