As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to force those studios to disclose how they themselves use AI.
Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement last year, noting that the startup’s imaging models could create images of characters, such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, that are owned by the studios. A few months later, Warner Bros. sued Midjourney also.
The startup maintains that training its AI models with images of copyrighted characters is allowed under fair use.
The current dispute revolves around the documentation that studies will be required to submit during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that studios would have to provide information about their use of generative AI, but only when it led to “consumer-facing” videos and images.
In his last presentationMidjourney seeks to overturn that limitation, arguing that it “unfairly” allows studios to “select only those documents they believe support their market injury claims, while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support their defenses.”
Midjourney goes on to claim that “the documents they (the studios) are withholding are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they demand of Midjourney.”
For example, the startup says that if studios are developing image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboards or content ideas for film or television, that evidence would still demonstrate that it is industry custom, even among studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed and copyrighted content.”
In the filing, the startup also argues that the studios should disclose all of the cues they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting results, not just the cues that produced the allegedly infringing images.
The main lawyer of the studies. David Singer previously claimed that Midjourney was seeking this documentation. as part of a “fishing expedition.”
He also said that the studios “are not seeking to stop AI technology or even put Midjourney out of business,” but rather “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and television shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include unauthorized copies of (their) famous people.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
