Universal Pictures

The RIAA is throwing its support behind a blockbuster copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against artificial intelligence firm Midjourney, calling the case “a critical stand for human creativity.”
The lawsuit, filed earlier on Wednesday (June 11), claims Midjourney has stolen “countless” copyrighted works to train its AI image generator — and it marks the first foray of major Hollywood studios into a growing legal battle between AI firms and human artists.

Disney and Universal’s new case, which comes as major music companies litigate their own infringement suits against AI firms, “represents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation,” RIAA chairman/CEO Mitch Glazier wrote in a statement.

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“There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry,” Glazier says. “Unfortunately, some bad actors — like Midjourney — see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game. These short-sighted AI companies are stealing human-created works to generate machine-created, virtually identical products for their own commercial gain. That is not only a violation of black letter copyright law but also manifestly unfair.”

AI models like Midjourney are “trained” by ingesting millions of earlier works, teaching the machine to spit out new ones. Amid the meteoric rise of the new technology, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in federal court over that process, arguing that AI companies are violating copyrights on a massive scale.

AI firms argue such training is legal “fair use,” transforming all those old “inputs” into entirely new “outputs.” Whether that argument succeeds in court is a potentially trillion-dollar question — and one that has yet to be definitively answered by federal judges.

Disney and Universal’s new lawsuit against Midjourney is the latest such case — and immediately one of the most high-profile. The 110-page lawsuit claims the startup “helped itself” to vast amounts of copyrighted content, allowing its users to create images that “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters.”

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the companies wrote in their complaint, lodged in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday morning.

The case echoes arguments made by Universal Music, Warner Music and Sony Music, which filed their own massive lawsuit against the AI music firms Udio and Suno last summer. In that case, the music giants say the tech startups have stolen music on an “unimaginable scale” to build models that are “trampling the rights of copyright owners.”

Music publishers have filed their own case, accusing Anthropic of infringing copyrighted song lyrics with its Claude model. Numerous other artists and creative industries — from newspapers to photographers to visual artists to software coders — have launched similar cases.

Disney and Universal’s complaint makes the same basic argument — that using copyrighted works to train AI is illegal — but does so by citing some of the most iconic movie and TV characters in history. Disney cites Darth Vader from Star Wars,  Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story and Homer Simpson from The Simpsons; Universal mentions Shrek, the Minions, Kung Fu Panda and others.

“Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” lawyers for the studios write. “Midjourney’s conduct misappropriates Disney’s and Universal’s intellectual property and threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”