Three months after Disney and Universal sued AI image generator Midjourney for copyright infringement, Warner Bros Discovery has joined the fight. The media giant has launched its own lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing it of “brazenly dispens[ing] Warner Bros Discovery’s intellectual property as if it were its own.”
Midjourney is a generative AI service that produces images based on text prompts: Tell it what you want and it’ll spit something out. The problem, as we noted when Disney and Universal filed their suit in June, is that there are no copyright guardrails. Midjourney is happy to churn out images that are direct lifts of copyrighted material—like this one, for instance, is clearly Woody from Toy Story, even though Midjourney has absolutely no legal right to be producing images of Woody from Toy Story.
“Midjourney could easily stop its theft and exploitation of Warner Bros Discovery’s intellectual property,” the lawsuit (via Culture Crave) states. Instead, it alleges, “Midjourney has made a calculated and profit-driven decision to offer zero protection for copyright owners even though Midjourney knows about the breathtaking scope of its piracy and copyright infringement.”
To reinforce its point, the suit includes numerous images and links from the Midjourney Discord and Subreddit, like this one from a couple months ago entitled “Superman’s bored”:
The lawsuit contains numerous other examples of its properties being rendered in Midjourney, but you can just head over to the subreddit to see them in the wild. “That the examples above are on Midjourney’s own Discord server and its Midjourney subreddit shows that Midjourney had actual knowledge of its service’s infringement,” the lawsuit states.
The suit claims that Midjourney did briefly have “technology protection measures” attached to its video service, but “inexplicably” chose to remove them.
“Midjourney’s actions validate Warner Bros Discovery’s concerns that Midjourney can and will remove copyright protection measures on a whim,” the suit states. “Midjourney refuses to stop its infringement while many of Midjourney’s competitors have implemented technological measures to prevent the generation of infringing outputs.”
Legal wrangling over generative AI is nothing new—Midjourney was hit with a class action lawsuit filed by a group of artists in 2023, for instance—and there’s probably a lot of it that lies ahead because this genie is not going back into the bottle. But the fate of Midjourney may ultimately prove instructive: Tech giants may eventually find a way to wrangle rulings allowing them to do pretty much whatever they want with other people’s stuff, but the combined legal teams of Disney, Universal, and now Warner bring a lot of gun to the fight. That may be enough to force Midjourney to make meaningful concessions to copyright that eventually serve as precedents for the entire industry.
