This inspires the feeling of hating both sides of a fight and hoping that they do as much damage to each other as possible before it ends.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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It is a bit like alien vs predator. Whoever wins, we lose. (And even that is owned by disney).
You want my take, this probably isn't gonna injure Disney all that much - they're one of the largest megacorps on the entire planet, and they've got damning evidence of infringement against Midjourney.
How much damage Midjourney's gonna take (at least in the immediate term), I'm not sure. If they settle ASAP, they can probably limit the damage, but if they try and fight, they'll probably be bankrupted by the case.
For you, the day Disney graced your independent research lab was the most important day of your life. But for Disney, it was Tuesday.
-M. Bison (the M stands for Mickey Mouse)
Not sure how I feel here. I hate overzealous legal departments and AI services, although admittedly Midjourney seems less scummy than some alternatives (like open AI). At least they're not attacking someone who pirated Frozen 2 or made a fan game or something, like certain legal departments would.
oh yeah, "they're making a bundle bootlegging our clearly in-copyright shit" is rather more clear cut
I guess the main question here is: Would their business model remain profitable even after licensing fees to Disney and possibly a lot of other copyright holders?
LLMs aren’t profitable even if they never had to pay a penny on license fees. The providers are losing money on every query, and can only be sustained by a firehose of VC money. They’re all hoping for a miracle.
Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions.
From the article.
According to them at least.
Absolutely not.
I expect they think they can get a precedent here.
That's true - the case is pretty clear-cut thanks to how much damning evidence they've managed to pull out. The old trend of using AI to make offensive shit in the Pixar style likely helped as well, but that's speculation on my end.
Midjourney is also odd in that it didn’t take money from outside investors and it’s actually profitable selling monthly subscriptions. This is an AI company that is not a venture capital money bonfire, it’s an actual business.
I suspect Disney isn’t out to just shut Midjourney down. Disney’s goal is to gouge Midjourney for a settlement and a license.
In practice, I doubt Disney's gonna get to shake much out of Midjourney before they end up going under - given that gen-AI is built to facilitate plagiarism and copyright infringement, a win for Disney here would lead to a de facto ban on generative AI.
Promise?