In a major shot against an artificial intelligence company, entertainment giants Disney and Universal have filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco-based company Midjourney Inc, alleging direct and secondary copyright infringement. The 143-page complaint, including attached exhibits, was filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California, on June 11.

The complaint noted that for over 100 years, Disney and Universal “have delighted audiences around the world by investing in and fostering American creative innovation and producing some of the greatest motion pictures and fictional characters of all time.” Between them, the companies oversee a vast array of properties, including the Disney and Universal Pictures libraries, Star Wars and Marvel franchises, as well as other IPs from Pixar’s animated films to James Cameron’s Avatar.

The defendant Midjourney “seeks to reap the rewards,” the suit said, of these creative endeavors by offering an A.I. generating service that “functions as a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works.”

Mark Hamill and Yoda in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Photo: Lucasfilm / Sunset Boulevard / Corbis via Getty Images.

By helping itself to Disney and Universal’s copyrighted works and then distributing images (the suit says videos are next) that “blatantly incorporate” the company’s famous characters, “Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with A.I. or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” according to the complaint.

Calling Midjourney’s alleged infringement “calculated and willful,” the complaint added that the conduct threatens to “upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”

Midjourney, which reported 20 million users in 2023, did not immediately respond to Artnet News’s request for comment.

In a statement shared with Artnet News, Kim Harris, NBCUniversal’s executive vice president and general counsel said: “Creativity is the cornerstone of our business.  We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”

Horacio Gutierrez, senior executive vice president and chief legal and compliance officer of the Walt Disney Company, emphasized in another statement that the company’s “world-class IP” has been built on “copyright law that give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works.” He added: “We are bullish on the promise of A.I. technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity.”

Side-by-side comparison in the complaint showing copyrighted Bart Simpsons character and Midjourney’s output. Photo: Disney and NBCUniversal v. Midjourney complaint.

The complaint includes dozens of pages detailing examples of the copyrighted characters the two companies have created over the years, along with visual examples of how the imagery and characters have been infringed.

For instance, if a Midjourney user submits a simple text prompt requesting an image of the Minions characters (from animated film Despicable Me) in a particular setting or doing a particular action, the platform obliges by generating and displaying a high quality, downloadable image featuring Universal’s Minions, according to the complaint.

The suit added that Midjourney consistently and accurately reproduces copies and derivatives of characters including Yoda, the Simpsons, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Spider-Man.

Side-by-side comparison in the complaint showing copyrighted Yoda character and Midjourney’s output. Photo: Disney and NBCUniversal v. Midjourney complaint.

Further, Midjourney also copies and uses the companies’ copyrighted characters to market and promote its Image Service, encouraging even more infringement and falsely implying their endorsement, the complaint alleged.

The suit claimed that Midjourney “could easily stop its theft and exploitation” since it controls what copyrighted content it selects, copies, and includes in its Image Service, but says the company has refused to do so. According to the lawsuit, Midjourney offers tiered monthly subscription rates for its Image Service that range from $10 to $120.

Disney and Universal allege that each act of infringement by Midjourney constitutes a separate and distinct act of infringement. They are asking for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per each infringed work.

Midjourney, as well as fellow A.I. generators DeviantArt, Stability A.I., and Runway A.I., are currently facing a separate lawsuit brought by a group of artists who are alleging copyright violation. The class action suit takes issue with the Stable Diffusion model and its LAION dataset, allegedly built by scraping billions of images on the internet without consent.