Associated Press Technology Writer Shaun Chen
NEW YORK (AP) — Disney and Universal filed a copyright lawsuit Wednesday against popular artificial intelligence image generator Midgenie.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, alleges that Midi Joanie pirated two Hollywood studio libraries to generate and distribute “infinitely illicit copies” of famous characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars and Minions from the Sneaky Me.
“Midjourney is a typical copyright freerider and a bottomless hole in plagiarism. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement and whether the infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not infringe infringement,” the company states the complaint.
The studio also alleged that the San Francisco-based AI company had ignored requests to halt infringement of copyrighted works and take technical measures to stop such image generation.
Midjourney did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image production service as “a kind of search engine like” and drew a wide range of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about technology to how such laws adapted to human creativity.
“Can a person look at someone else’s photo, learn from it and create similar pictures?” Holtz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed by people, and if not, it will destroy the entire professional arts industry, perhaps the non-professional industry as well. As long as AIS is learning like people, it’s the same thing and the images seem different.”
Although major AI developers typically do not disclose data sources, they argue that robbing online text, images and other media that are publicly available to train AI systems is protected by the doctrine of “fair use” of American copyright law.
Studio cases will take part in increasing numbers of lawsuits filed in San Francisco and New York against developers of AI platforms such as Openai, humanity and other countries.
Meanwhile, the first major copyright trial of the generation AI industry is underway in London, piting Getty Images against the stability AI of an artificial intelligence company.
Original issue: June 11, 2025, 1:42pm EDT
