Disney and NBCUniversal launch joint lawsuit against AI company, Midjourney, but aren't suing on behalf of the little guy

Today in The Lawyers Are Being Fed news, Disney and NBCUniversal launched a joint lawsuit against Midjourney, a generative AI company that specializes in image and video slop. The suit comes from two of the most powerful holders of intellectual property in the entertainment industry and is in part being led by Disney’s legendary copyright team, a group of attorneys you do not want to sit across from in court. In a legal cage match who would win: Disney’s copyright lawyers or prosecutors from the SDNY?

The lawsuit calls Midjourney “a bottomless pit of plagiarism” and includes dozens of examples comparing the studios’ copyrighted characters with Midjourney’s output. The suit lays out how Midjourney “trained” its software by scraping the internet, i.e. downloading huge volumes of copyrighted data, like character images, to dump into the software’s engine which it then uses to spit out slop on demand. There is also a legal definition of “Shrek”:

The suit includes the legal definition of Shrek
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron.com) 2025-06-11T16:01:08.431Z

The suit also includes an excerpt from a 2022 interview in which Midjourney CEO David Holz said the software’s dataset was built by “a big scrape of the internet”.

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So far, AI companies have tried to claim “fair use” when faced with IP infringement and copyright claims. Fair use is a doctrine that allows for quotes and/or examples from copyrighted materials for the purposes of reporting, criticism, research, or teaching. Video essayists can use clips from movies under fair use, parodies are protected by fair use, and fair use also protects fan fiction. But Midjourney charges its users subscription and licensing fees, they’re not hobbyists and they’re definitely not teachers. They are profiting from the use of someone else’s intellectual property (the company made $300 million last year), which their own CEO admitted they stole.

Midjourney is also named in another lawsuit brought by ten artists accusing it, Stability, DeviantArt, and Runway with copyright infringement, that lawsuit was allowed to proceed last year and is ongoing. This suit, though, coming from two of the biggest IP monsters there are, seems designed for maximum destruction. I bet they argue that characters like Darth Vader, Shrek, the Minions, and Buzz Lightyear are such core pieces of Disney’s and Universal’s brand identities that they are essentially priceless, and then Midjourney will be bankrupted by the inevitable settlement. My hope is that such a precedent will make it easier for smaller creators and artists to go after AI companies and get a bit of their own back.

But make no mistake, Disney and NBCUniversal aren’t suing on behalf of the little guy. They’re not even anti-AI, with Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez, saying, “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity.”

They want to control the slop. They don’t want users paying someone else for the slop, they want to charge those users themselves. Further, they want to be able to use AI in the creative process—and already are, though most people are smart enough not talk publicly about it because public sentiment is against AI (for now). So no, this is not about barring AI from the film industry, it’s just about money and control. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some incidental protection for individual artists out of it, too.

I don’t even need to be a lawyer to know this is going to be hard for Midjourney to defend, especially since the CEO is on the record admitting they scraped the internet to steal copyrighted material to train their software to copy-paste images of Yoda and Shrek. This lawsuit seems destined to settle because I cannot imagine a defense beyond some level of whining about “but if we have to pay for copyrighted material, we’ll go bankrupt”.