The era of machine-driven creativity faces its first major legal test in cinema. In a lawsuit that could redefine the future of image production tools, Hollywood giants like Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a federal lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the most popular text-to-image generation platforms.
The complaint, filed in Los Angeles, accuses Midjourney of building its business on massive and deliberate copyright infringement, directly impacting iconic characters such as Darth Vader, Elsa, Shrek, and the Minions.
The Mechanics of the Accusation: Training and Monetization
According to the studios, Midjourney’s infringement scheme operates in two fundamental stages:
- Data Scraping: The lawsuit alleges that Midjourney trained its artificial intelligence models using a vast library of images extracted directly from their films, without any permission or licensing. Thousands of frames were allegedly used to teach the AI to replicate styles, characters, and settings.
- On-Demand Generation: With the trained model, the platform allows its millions of subscribers to generate images of these characters in any imaginable context, functioning, in the studios’ words, as a “virtual vending machine” for pirated intellectual property.
The lawsuit presents examples of prompts like “Darth Vader on a fashion runway in Paris,” which result in studio-quality images. For Disney and Universal, the case is clear, and the violation of U.S. copyright law is “unequivocal.”
The Business Model at the Heart of the Dispute
The legal action focuses not only on the technology but also on Midjourney’s robust financial model. With subscription revenue estimated at $300 million for 2024, the studios argue that the primary driving force behind this growth is the demand for images of their franchises.
Midjourney’s service is structured into four paid plans, ranging from $10 to $120 per month. These plans offer users different amounts of “GPU time” to generate images. Even the most basic plan allows for the creation of hundreds of images, while the higher tiers offer virtually unlimited generations.
With over 20 million registered users, the studios claim that every image generated using their intellectual property exacerbates the commercial damage, transforming the infringement into a monthly Software as a Service (SaaS) product.
What Are the Studios Demanding?
Disney and NBCUniversal’s claims are comprehensive, seeking not only financial compensation but also a fundamental change in Midjourney’s operations. The demands include:
- Damages: Payment of statutory damages, which could reach up to $150,000 for each infringed work.
- Injunctive Relief: A preliminary and permanent court order preventing Midjourney from distributing any images or future videos depicting their intellectual properties unless robust filters are implemented.
- Transparency: Full disclosure of the dataset used to train its AI models, a crucial point for understanding the extent of the alleged infringement.
- Disgorgement of Profits: The creation of a trust to hold all profits obtained by Midjourney from the misuse of their properties.
- Attorneys’ Fees: Reimbursement for the legal costs of the lawsuit.
This confrontation is the first of its kind brought by major Hollywood studios and promises to be a watershed moment.
The final decision could establish a crucial precedent for how AI models can be trained, licensed, and monetized, shaping the future of creative tools and the balance between technological innovation and the protection of intellectual property in the audiovisual world.