Context: There has been a massive uptick in AI copyright infringement lawsuits filed in the music, book, and news organization industries, both in the U.S. and globally. OpenAI is among those most targeted, as it faces suits in the U.S. (March 27, 2025 ai fray article), Canada (December 3, 2024 ai fray article), and India (January 27, 2025 ai fray article). It is joined by Meta (March 13, 2025 ai fray article), Claude AI maker Anthropic (May 23, 2025 ai fray article), and Ross Intelligence (April 16, 2025 ai fray article) in making recent headlines. But the movie industry has generally been slower to the mark, with only a couple of minor cases filed in the U.S., including “Blade Runner 2049” producer Alcon Entertainment, LLC (Alcon) against Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery last October, which Tesla recently lost a bid to dismiss (April 8, 2025 ai fray article).
What’s new: The Walt Disney Company and Universal Studios are suing AI-image generator Midjourney in the Central District of California for “blatantly” copying and incorporating their famous characters, such as Shrek and Spider-Man, into its platform without authorization. They are seeking a preliminary injunction, damages and Midjourney’s profits (the company made $300 million in revenue in 2024), alleging that Midjourney’s actions threaten to “upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.” The studios’ subsidiaries Marvel Characters, MVL Film Finance, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox, and Dreamworks are also listed as co-plaintiffs.
Direct impact and wider ramifications: This is the first major complaint filed by Hollywood studios over AI copyright infringement, which could open the floodgates for many more in the industry – just like the cases filed by the New York Times and ThomsonReuters, and Universal Music and Concord did in the publishing and music industries, respectively.
In a statement yesterday, the Walt Disney Company’s senior executive vice president and chief legal and compliance officer Horacio Gutierrez (also Microsoft’s former head of IP), noted that they 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,” he added, “piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
This is the complaint:
The complaint, filed yesterday, alleges that Midjourney’s service is essentially a “virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works.”
The AI platform generates images featuring Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted characters, including Elsa from “Frozen” and Shrek. In addition, it has started training its “Video Service”, meaning that the company “is very likely already infringing the plaintiffs’ copyrighted works in connection with its video service”, they write.
They claim to have asked Midjourney to stop infringing their copyrighted works several times, but that the company has ignored those requests as it is only focused on “its bottom line”, making $300 million in 2024 alone.
“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism [and] threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts,” Disney and Universal have alleged.
Counsel
Disney and Universal Studios are being represented by a team at Los Angeles-based Jenner & Block LLP: David R. Singer, Julie A. Shepard, and Lauren M. Greene.
Midjourney is also facing a class action in the art industry (alongside Stability AI and Runway AI), led by cartoonist Sarah Andersen and illustrator Kelly McKernan (November 29, 2023 complaint (PDF)). The suit alleges that users can input an artist’s name into the company’s platform, and it will produce copyrighted artworks that have been “harvested” from those artists’ portfolios.