Back in June 2025, Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit against the AI research lab Midjourney. Now, Midjourney has submitted its response to the litigation.
Who is Midjourney?
Midjourney, Inc. is an AI research company based in San Francisco. The company produced a generative AI platform, also called Midjourney, which was first made available in July 2022. Since then, the AI model has gone through several iterations and version 7 was released in April this year. Midjourney generates digital images from text-based prompts. You can create images using Discord bot commands or via the official Midjourney website.
Why has Disney issued a lawsuit?
The lawsuit from Disney and Universal alleged that the Midjourney generative AI model is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” This is because Disney and Universal claim that Midjourney generates “innumerable” copies of copyrighted characters. These include Darth Vader, Yoda, Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk and Elsa from Frozen.
Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s chief legal officer, also said that AI “can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity”. However, he added, “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
How has Midjourney responded?
Midjourney’s response sets out the company’s position that training a generative AI on copyrighted images is fair use. It also denies that Midjourney is liable for the images created by the tool. Rather, it describes the platform as “an instrument for user expression. It assists with the creation of images only at the direction of its users, guided by their instructions.”
In addition, Midjourney denies that it is profiteering from copyright infringement. Instead, it argues that “this case is about whether Plaintiffs’ alleged copyrights entitle them to prohibit the use of their works to train generative AI models.”
Reports suggest that Midjourney earned as much as $300 million in revenue from subscribers to its generative AI. As a result, Disney and Universal are seeking damages, as well as an injunction to stop Midjourney from creating images that infringe their copyrights. However, Midjourney’s submission states that the two studios “cannot have it both ways, seeking to profit—through their use of Midjourney and other generative AI tools—from industry-standard AI training practices on the one hand, while on the other hand accusing Midjourney of wrongdoing for the same.”
What we think
The data used to train generative AI has been an area of dispute for some time. Midjourney claims that the training of their AI is covered by the principle of fair use. However, the lawsuit from Disney and Universal is aimed at the output from the generative AI, rather than what it was trained on. Midjourney also wants to put responsibility for the content of the images on the users of the service. It’s clear that the future of AI is going to be decided in the courts, and the legal battle has a long way to run.
