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Warner Bros. is taking legal action against the AI company Midjourney, accusing it of copyright infringement. The claim is that Midjourney allows its vast user base to create AI-generated images and videos featuring copyrighted characters such as Superman and Bugs Bunny.
It’s the third big Hollywood studio to sue Midjourney in Los Angeles federal court after Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit in June.
Midjourney, based in San Francisco, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit contends that Midjourney built its AI system using “illegal copies” of Warner Bros. content. It further claims that the company encourages users to select iconic characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo, or the Powerpuff Girls to create images and videos of these characters in “every imaginable scene.”
According to the lawsuit, even a basic prompt to the AI system to generate a “classic comic book superhero battle” yields high-quality images of DC Studios characters like Superman, Batman, and Flash.
Warner Bros. argues that “Midjourney thinks it is above the law” and could easily prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property in the same manner it restricts violence or nudity in its outputs.
The lawsuit also claims that Midjourney’s actions lead to “consumer confusion about what is lawful and what is not,” misleading users into believing that the creation of countless infringing images and videos through its service is somehow sanctioned by Warner Bros. Discovery.
The entertainment giant says it is entitled to up to $150,000 in damages per infringed work.
In response to similar allegations from Disney and Universal, Midjourney has denied any copyright infringement. In an August court statement, they argued that their AI tool was trained on “billions of publicly available images” to learn visual concepts and their relationship to language.
“Training a generative AI model to understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use – a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have considered the issue,” said Midjourney’s response, citing recent court rulings in lawsuits by published authors against Anthropic and Facebook parent Meta.
Midjourney also said the onus was on its customers to follow Midjourney’s terms of use, which prohibit infringing intellectual property rights.
In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, Midjourney CEO David Holz described his image-making service as “kind of like a search engine” pulling in a wide swath of images from across the internet. He compared copyright concerns about the technology with how such laws have adapted to human creativity.
“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.”
