Disney, Universal Sue 'Bottomless Pit of Plagiarism'

"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," Disney and Universal say in a landmark copyright-infringement lawsuit against the AI image generator. Artists and authors, among others, have sued AI companies that scrape content from the internet and elsewhere to train their software, but this is the first lawsuit of its kind from Hollywood studios, the New York Times reports.

• The lawsuit says Midjourney generated "endless unauthorized copies" of copyrighted characters and disregarded requests to stop. The suit includes examples of Midjourney-generated images of characters from Star Wars, The Avengers, The Simpsons, and the Minions from Despicable Me, NBC News reports.
• Subsidiaries listed in the lawsuit include Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, and DreamWorks Animation, the Los Angeles Times reports.

• The New York Times reports that the the lawsuit "reads like a shot across the bow to AI companies in general." It warns that the use of copyrighted material by generative AI "threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of US copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts."
• "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," Disney chief legal and compliance officer Horacio Gutierrez said in a statement. "But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing."
• In 2022, Midjourney CEO David Holz told the AP that the service was like a "search engine" pulling images from the internet. "Can a person look at somebody else's picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?" Holz said. "Obviously, it's allowed for people and if it wasn't, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it's sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it's fine."

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