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Disney and Universal sue Midjourney for making AI ripoffs of their biggest characters
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
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Technology
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I don't really understand this. What's the difference if I watch a Disney movie and make pictures? Midjourney isn't selling the pictures, I think that's where it gets to be illegal.
If my printer has the capacity to print what I created and it's a copyrighted thing then do they sue Epson or me? It's just taking the work out of being artistic, but I don't see how it's different than me making the image myself as long as I don't sell it.
Midjourney is a product that is being sold for money. Midjourney is making money off of providing users with unauthorized images of Disney and Universal characters. Midjourney is not making up original characters that happen to look like the licensed characters; they are just producing the characters themselves:
Furthermore, we know that Midjourney obtained the ability to generate these images by training on Disney's and Universal's copyrighted properties. This is why Midjourney knows these characters by name.
To your example, I think one big difference is that if you make a digital drawing of Mickey Mouse and then print it out, you are not going on to share that image with a global marketplace of other Epson users. Additionally, you also need an uncommon level of drawing skill to produce a drawing that is so convincing that people may confuse it for Disney's own work. Midjourney has a social page where users share their creations, and those pages are littered with people's low-effort generations of licensed characters:
With Midjourney, any doofus can generate an image of Mickey Mouse flipping off Goofy, and it will look good enough that most people will think Disney made it. If the internet is littered with images like this, it reduces the value of Disney's properties.
Thanks for the detailed response!
Midjourney makes money selling access to their model. Midjourney's model, like those of OpenAI, has no value without the training data. In fact, the model is a derivative work of all of the works that it was trained on. The training data was obtained without license to resell or create derivative works.
While I hate how much the Mouse has screwed with IP law and prevented productive reforms, I hope they refuse to settle and get a judgement that bankrupts Midjourney and establishes the precedent that AI companies have to follow the law and make licensing agreements with any creator's works that will be used. Can't exist as a company if that happens? Boo-fucking-hoo. It's not society's job to subsidize the wealthy's desire to run a business model that depends on violating the law and causing financial harm to artists.
I guess it comes down to whether it's legal to train image generation models on copyrighted material. Midjourney etc can't produce a very accurate image of copyrighted characters if those characters aren't in the training set.