Midjourney is turning the tables. The AI startup is in a legal fight with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. over copyright. Now it wants the studios to reveal what they’re doing with AI behind closed doors.
Disney and Universal sued last year, claiming Midjourney’s models can generate images of owned characters like Bart Simpson and Darth Vader. Warner Bros. joined later. Midjourney says training on copyrighted characters is fair use.
The fight right now is about discovery — what documents the studios have to hand over. A judge ruled the studios must provide info about their gen AI usage, but only when it leads to consumer-facing content. Midjourney wants that limit removed.
In its latest filing, the startup argues the studios are cherry-picking. They get to show documents that support their market harm claims while withholding anything that helps Midjourney’s defense. The core argument: if the studios themselves are training AI models on unlicensed content for internal storyboarding or ideation, that proves it’s an industry practice.
Midjourney also wants the studios to hand over every prompt they’ve ever used in Midjourney and all the resulting outputs, not just the allegedly infringing ones.
The studios’ lawyer called it a fishing expedition. This one is going to keep going.
