As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to force those studios to reveal how they themselves use AI.
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement last year, noting that the startup’s image generation models could create images of characters, such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, owned by the studios. A few months later, Warner Bros. sued. also Midjourney.
The startup claims that training its AI models on images of copyrighted characters is allowed under fair use.
The current dispute concerns the documentation that the studios must produce during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that the studios would indeed have to provide information about their generative AI use – but only when it led to “consumer-facing” videos and images.
In its latest filing, Midjourney seeks to overturn that restriction, arguing that it “unfairly” allows the studios to “select only those documents they believe support their claims of market injury, while depriving Midjourney of documents that might support their defense.”
Midjourney goes on to claim that “the documents [the studios] detainer are the very ones who would reveal whether behind closed doors they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing.”
For example, the startup says that if the studios develop image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboarding or content ideation for film or television, the evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry practice, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.”
In the filing, the startup also argues that the studios must disclose all the prompts they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting outputs, not just the prompts that produced the allegedly infringing images.
The studios’ lead attorney, David Singer, previously claimed that Midjourney sought this documentation as part of a “fishing expedition.”
He also said the studios “are not seeking to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business” but rather “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly showing, publicly performing and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] famous characters without authorization.”
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