The lawsuit refers to Midjourney as a “quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism”.
Media giants Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against GenAI company Midjourney alleging the unauthorised copying of the studios’ copyrighted work. The complaint states that Midjourney allows users to create additional images based off of content belonging to other organisations, for example Disney’s Darth Vader and Universal’s Shrek.
Other such famous figures include Star Wars’ Yoda, characters from Toy Story, Frozen’s Elsa, the Minions from Despicable Me and Homer Simpson.
Midjourney, which is a San Francisco-based start-up, runs an independent research lab and enables people to generate AI images based on prompts, many of which the lawsuit claims “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters without investing a penny in their creation”.
Additionally, the complaint states that “Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism” and that regardless of how the content was created, in this case via AI, “technology does not make it any less infringing”.
Prior to the filing of the lawsuit, Midjourney was issued with several cease-and-desist letters, putting the company on notice with reference to the use of protected characters, however, the complaint argues that the GenAI platform is potentially “willfully blind to, the direct infringement of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works done through its image service”.
The suit asks for Midjourney to pay damages of an unspecified amount. Disney and Universal have also asked that the judge overseeing the complaint prevent Midjourney from offering its “forthcoming video service without appropriate copyright protection measures to prevent such infringement”.
While this is reportedly the first case of a lawsuit being brought against AI by a major Hollywood-based media company, artists feeling threatened and having their work illegally replicated by generative AI is not new.
In fact Midjourney was one of the organisations mentioned in a copyright lawsuit last year filed by a group of artists against companies using text-to-image generators. Other companies listed were StabilityAI and DeviantArt.
In 2022 there was outrage as an AI-generated piece of artwork, created on Midjourney, won first prize at the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition, leading to further discussion on the ethics and fairness of using AI to create artistic content.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
