{"id":120371,"date":"2025-09-05T08:39:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T08:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/120371\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T08:39:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T08:39:09","slug":"warner-bros-discovery-sues-midjourney-for-infringement-in-major-legal-battle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/120371\/","title":{"rendered":"Warner Bros. Discovery Sues Midjourney for Infringement In Major Legal Battle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWarner Bros. Discovery<\/a> is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit accuses Midjourney<\/a>, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company \u201cbrazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s intellectual property\u201d by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners,\u201d said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. \u201cMidjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It\u2019s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.<\/p>\n

\n\tWarner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAn example cited in Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s lawsuit: At left is a Midjourney output of Bugs Bunny, at right are actual Warner Bros.\u2019 images of Bugs Bunny.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a statement, Disney said it\u2019s \u201ccommitted to protecting our creators and innovators\u201d and that it\u2019s \u201cpleased to be joined by Warner Bros. Discovery in the fight against Midjourney\u2019s blatant copyright infringement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAdded NBCUniversal, \u201cCreative artists are the backbone of our industry, and we are committed to protecting their work and our intellectual property.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the lawsuit, Warner Bros. Discovery points to Midjourney generating images of iconic copyrighted characters. At the forefront are heroes who\u2019re at the center of DC Studios\u2019 movies and TV shows, like Superman, Wonder Woman and The Joker; others are Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo characters who\u2019ve become ubiquitous household names; more are Cartoon Network characters, including those from Rick and Morty, who\u2019ve emerged as something of cultural touchstones in recent years.<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\tAnother example cited in Warner Bros. Discovery\u2019s lawsuit: At left is a Midjourney output of Rick and Morty, at right are actual Warner Bros.\u2019 stills of the show.<\/p>\n

\n\tMidjourney, which has four tiers of paid subscriptions ranging from $10 to $120 per month and didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment, returns characters owned by Warner Bros. Discovery even in response to prompts like \u201cclassic comic book superhero battle\u201d that don\u2019t explicitly mention any particular intellectual property, the complaint alleges.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs evidence that Midjourney trained its AI system on its intellectual property, the studio attaches dozens of images showing the tool\u2019s outputs compared to stills from its movies and TV shows. When prompted with \u201cBatman, screencap from The Dark Knight,\u201d the service returns an image of Christian Bale\u2019s portrayal of the character featuring the costume\u2019s Kevlar plate design that differentiated it from previous iterations of the hero that appears to be taken from the movie or promotional materials, with few to no alternations made. One of the more convincing examples highlights a 3D-animated Bugs Bunny mirroring his adaptation in Space Jam: A New Legacy.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit argues Midjourney\u2019s ability to return copyrighted characters is a \u201cclear draw for subscribers,\u201d diverting consumers away from purchasing Warner Bros. Discovery-approved posters, wall art and prints, among other products that must now compete against the service.<\/p>\n

\n\tLike OpenAI, the content used to train Midjourney\u2019s technology is a black box, representing an obstacle for some creators who\u2019ve sued AI companies for copyright infringement. Rightsholders have mined public statements from AI company C-suites for clues. In 2022, Midjourney founder David Holz said in an interview that his employees \u201cgrab everything they can, they dump it in a huge file, and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing.\u201d The specifics of the training process will be subject to discovery.<\/p>\n

\n\tWarner Bros. Discovery seeks Midjourney\u2019s profits attributable to the alleged infringement or, alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work, which could leave the AI company on the hook for massive damages.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe thrust of the studios\u2019 lawsuits will likely be decided by one question: Are AI companies covered by fair use, the legal doctrine in intellectual property law that allows creators to build upon copyrighted works without a license? On that issue, a court found earlier this year that Amazon-backed Anthropic is on solid legal ground, at least with respect to training.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe technology is \u201camong the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,\u201d wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, the court set the case for trial over allegations that the company illegal downloaded millions of books to create a library that was used for training. Anthropic, which later settled the lawsuit, faced potential damages of hundreds of millions of dollars stemming from the decision that may have laid the groundwork for Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney and Universal to get similar payouts depending on what they unearth in discovery over how Midjourney obtained copies of thousands of films and TV shosws that were repurposed to teach its image generator.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill on the sidelines in the fight over generative AI: Paramount Skydance, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple Studios, Sony Pictures and Lionsgate. Some have major AI ambitions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Warner Bros. Discovery is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,41621,105,6142],"class_list":{"0":"post-120371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-midjourney","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-warner-bros-discovery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}