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Disney and Universal's new lawsuit against Midjourney is shockingly blunt, calling the genAI company a "bottomless pit of plagerism"
The legal battle we all knew was coming is here, with Disney training their army of lawyers on Midjourney in a lawsuit that could have huge implications for genAI's viability going forward.
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It is the lawsuit we all kind of knew was coming; corporate behemoths Disney and Universal, usually adversaries for our increasingly dwindling free time and box office income, have joined forces to take on a common enemy. Midjourney, one of the most popular genAI image generation software in the world, is being sued by Disney and Universal in a suit that will undoubtedly have major implications for both copyright law and the future of genAI.
We’re not really surprised that this lawsuit came about, to be honest, but we are somewhat surprised by how blunt it is in its wording. One part calls the Midjourney a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” which is not how we expect lawyers to word things. Not that we disagree – we’ve had some strong words to say about the technology before – but lawyers tend to be a bit more restrained than we are.
Midjourney first came on the market in 2022 and operates like most genAI systems do; by scraping the internet for images and text so that it can create new images and videos based on prompts users type in. The problem comes as the technology doesn’t differentiate between copyrighted material and material that is in the public domain. In fact, OpenAI has argued that their ChatGPT system simply can’t operate without copyrighted material.
If Disney and Universal’s lawsuit is successful and they force Midjourney to remove material they own from the training data it uses, it will be a huge blow to genAI companies everywhere. We look forward to seeing what response Midjourney has to the lawsuit – and how quickly it will try to settle the lawsuit in some form or another.
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