Midjourney strikes back: sued AI giant demands Hollywood’s secrets

Midjourney, the AI image generator sued in 2025 by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros for copyright infringement, filed a motion on 29 June asking a US district court in California to revisit a mid-June ruling that denied its request to probe how the studios use AI. The studios allege Midjourney trained on publicly available images to enable users to generate depictions of copyrighted characters such as Superman, Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson, Yoda, and Darth Vader. Midjourney argues that if the studios also train generative-AI models by scraping and copying third-party copyrighted works, it would support a “fair use” defense and show the studios have “unclean hands,” while the studios’ lawyer David Singer has called the request a “fishing expedition.” The court has not indicated when it will rule on the motion, and legal observers note that fair use in generative-AI cases remains unsettled.

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