“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” Disney and Universal said in the lawsuit.
Disney and Universal have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence platform that now stands accused of stealing tens of thousands of licensed images.
According to The New York Times, the 110-page lawsuit alleges that Midjourney “helped itself to countless” copyright images in training its artificial intelligence model. Midjourney, like open-source Stable Diffusion models, is trained by feeding it vast amounts of material, which can be used to generate complex, prompt-based images and video.
“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” Disney and Universal said in the lawsuit.
Artificial intelligence companies, including Midjourney and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, have come under increasing fire for their practice of “scraping” the internet for visual and verbal content. Media outlets like The New York Times have filed similar lawsuits, alleging that AI tools can be used to reproduce licensed works and copyright-protected materials—almost always without offering compensation to the original creators.
“Midjourney, which has attracted millions of subscribers and made $300 million last year alone, is focused on its own bottom line and ignored Plaintiffs’ demands,” the lawsuit says.
However, the Times notes that Universal and Disney are the first two major Hollywood studios to claim that much of artificial intelligence’s success can be attributed to the “theft” of copyrighted content. Both studios have suggested that this form of theft “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of US copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television and other creative arts.”
“Creativity is the cornerstone of our business,” NBCUniversal executive president and general counsel Kimberly Harris said in a statement. “We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
Disney and Universal say that, before filing the lawsuit, they sent letters to Midjourney’s legal counsel seeking to prevent further alleged copyright violations; but Midjourney purportedly never responded, even as it released new and updated versions of its model.
Horacio Gutierrez, the senior executive vice president and chief legal and compliance officer for The Walt Disney Company, said that his client understands the allure of artificial intelligence—but believes that better tools shouldn’t be built using stolen material.
“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,” Gutierrez said in a statement. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
Sources
Disney and Universal Sue A.I. Firm for Copyright Infringement
Disney, Universal sue image creator Midjourney for copyright infringement
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