Disney and Universal have united in the face of a common enemy: artificial intelligence. The entertainment giants have filed a copyright lawsuit against Midjourney. The suit claims that the image generator scraped Disney and Universal content, and has allowed users to shamelessly copy some of the studios’ best-loved characters, like Darth Vader, Shrek, and Elsa from Frozen.
“By helping itself to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters — without investing a penny in their creation — Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit (via Reuters) reads. “Midjourney’s infringement is calculated and willful.”
According to the suit, Disney and Universal requested that Midjourney do something to stop users from using these characters in their art. However, the platform reportedly refused. Rather than tackling the issue, the studios claim that Midjourney doubled down and continued to launch more advanced versions of the software while people continued to use it to reproduce these major IPs.
Disney and Universal Are Fighting Back
In a statement to Reuters, Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer said: “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 an AI company does it does not make it any less infringing.”
Meanwhile, NBCUniversal Executive Vice President and General Counsel Kim Harris added that it filed the lawsuit to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
Midjourney has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
This isn’t the first time that an AI image generator has caused controversy in the movie world. Recently, there was a craze that involved generating images in the style of Hayo Miyazaki’s iconic Studio Ghibli style. While the studio never commented on the craze, many questioned the ethics of its use — and now, with the help of Disney and Universal, a court case could create a precedent.
