Midjourney is asking a judge to order Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros to hand over full details of their internal artificial intelligence usage.
The legal fight
The dispute began last year when Disney and Universal filed lawsuits alleging copyright infringement. They argued Midjourney’s image models could generate likenesses of their owned characters, including Bart Simpson and Darth Vader. Warner Bros. joined the legal action a few months later.
Midjourney maintains that training its models on images of copyrighted characters falls under fair use.
The current battle focuses on the scope of documents the studios must produce during discovery. A judge previously ruled that studios must provide information regarding their generative AI usage, but only when that usage resulted in “consumer-facing” videos and images.
Midjourney’s latest filing seeks to remove that restriction. The startup argues the limitation “unfairly” allows the studios to “cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.”
The startup claims the withheld documents would reveal whether the studios are doing exactly what they accuse Midjourney of doing behind closed doors.
For instance, Midjourney states that if the studios develop image-generating AI models for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would show it is an industry custom to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.
The filing also requests that the studios reveal all prompts used in Midjourney and the resulting outputs, not just the prompts that produced the allegedly infringing images.
David Singer, the studios’ lead attorney, previously described the request for documentation as a “fishing expedition.”
Singer added that the studios “do not seek 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 displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] famous characters without authorization.”
What it means
This procedural fight determines whether the studios must disclose how they internally use AI tools to create their own content. If Midjourney succeeds, it forces the studios to admit to practices they currently claim are illegal when done by others. If the studios win, they can continue to hide internal workflows while publicly accusing Midjourney of similar actions.
