As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to force those studios to disclose how they use AI themselves.
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for copyright infringement last year, noting that the startup’s image-generating 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. upped the ante. Midjourney also sued.
The startup says that training its AI models on images of copyrighted characters is permitted under fair use.
The current dispute is over what documents studios will need to produce during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that studios must indeed provide information about their generative use of AI — but only when it results in “consumer-facing” videos and photos.
in Her most recent depositMidjourney seeks to overturn this restriction, arguing that it “unfairly” allows studios to “select only those documents that they believe support their market damage claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.”
Midjourney goes on to claim that “the documents [the studios] What has been withheld are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjorney for doing.
For example, the startup says that if studios are developing image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboards or content visualization for film or television, this evidence would similarly demonstrate that it is common in the industry, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed, copyrighted content.”
In the filing, the startup also says that studios must disclose all of the claims they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting output, not just the claims that produced the allegedly infringing images.
Lead attorney for the studios David Singer previously claimed that Midjourney was seeking these documents As part of a “fishing trip”.
He also said that the studios “do not seek to shut down the AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business,” but “simply want Midjourney to stop copying its films and television shows and to cease distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] Famous personalities without permission.”
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