The Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios officially filed a copyright lawsuit against the AI company Midjourney on Wednesday, contending that its eponymous generative AI software was created using piracy and plagiarism, and that it creates plagiarist images for users as well. The companies filed their lawsuit in a federal district court in Los Angeles, and their respective attorneys, Horacio Gutierrez and Kim Harris, gave statements to Reuters on this movie. Both felt that their case is strong, echoing the sentiments of many pundits and concerned creators in recent years. So far, Midjourney has not commented publicly or responded to reporters from other outlets, nor have the creators of other AI programs like OpenAI and Stable Diffusion.
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“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,” said Gutierrez, who is also an executive vice president and chief legal officer for Disney.
Harris is an executive vice president for NBCUniversal, and general counsel for the company. She said that this lawsuit is meant to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
The lawsuit claims that both studios have communicated with Midjourney on this issue before, and that Midjourney has refused to address the inherent infringement in its process. “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,” it said. “Midjourney’s infringement is calculated and willful.”
This is not the first lawsuit for copyright infringement filed against AI developers — authors, artists, musicians, journalists, and distributors have sued Midjourney and its competitors many times in the last few years for pirating their work, using it without a license, and distributing copyright-infringing creations to users. However, these cases are moving slowly through the legal system, and in the meantime the AI industry is rapidly accumulating wealth, making them a more formidable adversary in court.
Some commenters are already hopeful that major forces in the industry like Disney and Universal stand a better chance against these practices, and may be able to force change faster. For AI critics, that still leaves environmental issues unaddressed, as well as the issues surrounding job replacement. It’s unclear when this lawsuit will move forward.
