Midjourney Wants Hollywood Studios to Reveal Their AI Usage Details
AI startup Midjourney is seeking to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose how they use generative AI themselves, arguing that internal studio use would support its fair use defense in a copyright lawsuit.
Midjourney, the AI startup involved in an ongoing legal battle with three major Hollywood studios, is pushing to force those studios to reveal details about their own use of generative AI. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney last year for alleged copyright infringement, claiming the company’s image-generation models could create characters such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, which are owned by the studios. Warner Bros. later filed a similar lawsuit.
Midjourney argues that training its AI models on copyrighted character images falls under fair use. The current dispute centers on what documentation the studios must produce during discovery. A judge previously ruled that the studios must provide information about their generative AI usage—but only if it led to “consumer-facing” videos and images.
In its latest filing, Midjourney seeks to overturn that limitation, arguing that it “unfairly” allows the studios “to cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.” The startup further claims that the “documents [the studios] are withholding are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing.”
For example, Midjourney says that if the studios are developing image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.”
The filing also demands that the studios disclose all prompts they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting outputs, not just prompts that produced allegedly infringing images. The studios’ lead attorney, David Singer, previously called this a “fishing expedition.” He also stated that the studios “do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business,” but rather want Midjourney to stop copying their works without authorization.
