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[Toons]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/disney-universal-midjourney-ai-copyright.html

From the article:
"The lawsuit claims that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from the movie studios like Star Wars, The Simpsons and other films and alleges that Midjourney disregarded requests to stop.

Disney and Universal are demanding a jury trial, arguing that the actions threaten to "upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law."

"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the movie studios said, calling the actions "calculated and willful.""

Disney in its statement made clear that they are not opposed to AI(obviously) as a tool, but that "piracy is piracy". Both companies alleged that Midjourney ignored or was sluggish to respond to requests from the companies regarding this.

I think if Disney and Universal win this, it will set a major precedent that can serve as the foundation for future cases of a similar nature. Even from smaller IP holders, to have legal ownership or claim to even AI generated works. Interested in how it plays out for sure.

 

[MayauMiao]

I'm more surprised that Midjourney got away with it for this long.

 

[AJUMP23]

I can do stuff with it for personal use but maybe you will need to turn off monetization if you create ai assets from copyrighted characters. But also lame.

 

[Jinzo Prime]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/11/disney-universal-midjourney-ai-copyright.html

From the article:
"The lawsuit claims that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from the movie studios like Star Wars, The Simpsons and other films and alleges that Midjourney disregarded requests to stop.

Disney and Universal are demanding a jury trial, arguing that the actions threaten to "upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law."

"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the movie studios said, calling the actions "calculated and willful.""

Disney in its statement made clear that they are not opposed to AI(obviously) as a tool, but that "piracy is piracy". Both companies alleged that Midjourney ignored or was sluggish to respond to requests from the companies regarding this.

I think if Disney and Universal win this, it will set a major precedent that can serve as the foundation for future cases of a similar nature. Even from smaller IP holders, to have legal ownership or claim to even AI generated works. Interested in how it plays out for sure.

So they're going after Midjourney but not Open AI; guess they don't want to poke at US government interests.

 

[ResilientBanana]

It just grabs shit from the internet. If it's copyrighted, why is it on the internet?

 

[FinalBossWithTheMostPower]

It just grabs shit from the internet. If it's copyrighted, why is it on the internet?

Creators definitely should be able to post IP on the internet without fear of it being blatantly ripped off.

However, the world nor the internet work like that.

This problem isn't new, and neither is MidJourney. Disney faces the same dilemma anyone does when putting content on the web.

MidJourney is probably the best AI image generation tool available. It was doing Ghibli 3 years ago.

I would immediately tune the scrapers away from anything Disney-related and ban specific token strings from use in prompts and nothing of value will be lost.

 

[Dacvak]

This will be an uphill battle for IP holders, and they will inevitably lose. Even if they win their day in court, they'll lose the AI war. There will be no way to stop IP infringement for local, homegrown models.

 

[AJUMP23]

I hope a judge rules this is fair use.

 

[ChorizoPicozo]

 

[ProtoByte]

Short of creating their own propriety AI software that is restricted to use of their own catalogue, I don't see how Disney can make this claim and use other AI products in future. I do think law has potential to materially reign in just how much this stuff can be used.

 

[rm082e]

I can do stuff with it for personal use but maybe you will need to turn off monetization if you create ai assets from copyrighted characters. But also lame.

From the lawsuit:

There is no metadata attached to the images in their training database that let's them know which images are copyrighted. Because there's no metadata to reference, they can't tell when a user creates something that might be infringing on copyrights. This is the crux of the lawsuit. It's the same issue with OpenAI and all the sources they scrape that didn't give them permission.

 

[Chittagong]

There is a reason why it's utterly impossible to get GPT generate any kind of a cartoon mouse at all