A new challenge has emerged for Midjourney: a copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal on Wednesday, claiming the AI image-generation platform has unlawfully reproduced their copyrighted characters.
The lawsuit involves Disney’s various studios—Disney Enterprises, Marvel Characters, MVL Film Finance, Lucasfilm Ltd., and Twentieth Century Fox Film—as well as Universal’s Universal City Studios Productions and DreamWorks Animation. They describe Midjourney as “a virtual vending machine” that produces close replicas of their beloved characters.
The 110-page complaint alleges that the Bay Area startup engaged in extensive data scraping of the studios’ materials to train its algorithms, enabling it to create impressively accurate representations of characters such as Darth Vader, Bart Simpson, Iron Man, and Shrek, even when prompted with broad requests like “popular 90’s animated cartoon with yellow skin.”
(The voluminous screenshots juxtaposing Midjourney’s creations with original images from Disney and Universal make this lawsuit notably colorful.)
“By utilizing the Plaintiffs’ copyrighted materials and distributing images (and soon videos) that overtly copy Disney’s and Universal’s iconic characters—without contributing a single dollar to their creation—Midjourney is the ideal example of a copyright free-loader and a limitless source of plagiarism,” states the complaint.
Disney and Universal reference a January 2024 article in IEEE Spectrum by Gary Marcus and Reid Southen about “plagiaristic outputs” from generative-AI tools, as well as 2022 interviews of Midjourney’s CEO David Holz by Forbes and The Verge, where he discussed a careless data scraping method that disregarded copyright issues.
Copyright law protects fictional characters, not just the creative works they feature in, until they enter the public domain—a milestone decades away for the characters named in the Disney-Universal lawsuit.
The complaint highlights Midjourney’s prolific imitation of Disney and Universal characters, contrasting it with the platform’s strict enforcement of rules against nudity and political candidates’ images. It also notes that aside from one acknowledgment of a cease-and-desist letter from Disney’s lawyers, Midjourney failed to respond to the studios prior to the lawsuit.
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Disney and Universal’s lawsuit concludes with a request for unspecified damages, the recovery of Midjourney’s profits, and a permanent injunction preventing the company from using or recreating any of the studios’ material.
Midjourney did not offer a comment right away following the lawsuit announcement.
Reframing the AI Copyright Debate
The platform features several subscription options, beginning with a “Basic” plan at $10 per month or $96 annually. Launched in 2022 on a Discord server, it quickly attracted interest from creatives curious about generative AI; last year, Midjourney also started direct access on its own website.
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From the outset, “generative AI” has sparked debates over ethical issues concerning the way AI technologies handle extensive amounts of copyrighted material and the extent to which their results may mimic those originals.
“The generative AI sector brings up various new and complicated copyright law questions related to fair use, and these answers are difficult to foresee,” stated Blake Reid, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, in an email.
“However, I view the language in this complaint and the numerous pages of generated outputs alongside recognizable characters as an attempt to simplify these complex matters”—essentially a clear case of plagiarism, according to Blake.
Some legal cases involving generative AI are currently moving through the judicial system. In February, a federal judge sided with Thomson Reuters, ruling that an AI service’s reproduction of material from its Westlaw platform did not qualify as “fair use” according to copyright laws. In March, a judge permitted a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Meta, initiated by authors including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, to proceed.
Ziff Davis, the parent company of PCMag, is among the publishers taking legal action against AI platforms, having initiated a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, claiming it violated Ziff Davis copyrights while training and running its AI systems.
5 Ways to Enhance Your ChatGPT InteractionsAbout Rob Pegoraro
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