Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against generative AI company Midjourney over copyright infringement.
Disney & Universal Sue Midjourney
The two multimedia companies have filed the lawsuit in regards to “hundreds, if not thousands, of images generated by its Image Service at the request of its subscribers.”
On behalf of The Walt Disney Company, Horatio Gutierrez gave the following statement to Variety:
“Our world-class IP is built on decades of financial investment, creativity and innovation — investments only made possible by the incentives embodied in copyright law that give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works. 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 it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
Generative AI programs like Midjourney allow users to request a digitally created image by feeding prompts to the program. Theoretically, a user could request an image of copyrighted characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader, or Minions.
Additional quotes from the lawsuit claim Midjourney is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” saying that the company has made no investment in the creation of the characters but is still benefitting from the money gained from generating images featuring them:
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
According to an article by Reuters, Midjourney has previously faced similar lawsuits regarding copyright infringement. In a similar case last year, 10 artists sued the company for a copyright infringement suit that claimed Midjourney and some other AI companies had copied and stored their work, making the companies liable for using the art without permission. The ruling allowed the lawsuit to proceed further, and it is currently still in litigation.
Midjourney was started in 2021 by David Holz, who gains money through paid subscriptions to the image generation service. The company generated roughly “$300 million in revenue last year,” according to Reuters. In 2022, Holz defended his company’s use of online images by saying, “there isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from.”
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