Disney and NBCUniversal — a pair of media behemoths behind franchises ranging from "Star Wars" and "Toy Story" to "Minions" and "Shrek" — are suing AI company Midjourney, accusing it of enabling copyright infringement on a massive scale through its AI image generator tech.
In the lawsuit, which was filed in a California district court today, the two Hollywood juggernauts accused the firm of ignoring its previous requests to stop violating their intellectual property rights.
"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the scathing complaint reads, as quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
It's a major escalation in the fight between copyright holders and AI firms, a battle that has been brewing for years. Per Axios, it's the "first legal action that major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company."
And it's not just the use of image generators; generative AI writ large has triggered a barrage of lawsuits, with media companies accusing the likes of OpenAI and Google of training their large language models on their materials without fair compensation.
Those disputes have turned into a major pain point for the AI industry, despite surging enthusiasm for the tech.
Considering the sheer size of both Disney and Universal — Disney is the third largest media company by market cap in the world — Midjourney could soon be in a world of hurt.
Disney, in particular, has a long track rec