{"id":6433,"date":"2025-06-11T21:49:56","date_gmt":"2025-06-11T21:49:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/disney-universal-ai-lawsuit-applauded-by-record-labels\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T21:49:56","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T21:49:56","slug":"disney-universal-ai-lawsuit-applauded-by-record-labels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/disney-universal-ai-lawsuit-applauded-by-record-labels\/","title":{"rendered":"Disney & Universal AI Lawsuit Applauded by Record Labels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tT<\/span>he RIAA is throwing its support behind a blockbuster copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against artificial intelligence firm Midjourney, calling the case \u201ca critical stand for human creativity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit, filed earlier on Wednesday (June 11), claims Midjourney has stolen \u201ccountless\u201d copyrighted works to train its AI image generator \u2014 and it marks the first foray of major Hollywood studios into a growing legal battle between AI firms and human artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney and Universal\u2019s new case, which comes as major music companies litigate their own infringement suits against AI firms, \u201crepresents a critical stand for human creativity and responsible innovation,\u201d RIAA chairman\/CEO Mitch Glazier<\/strong> wrote in a statement.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry,\u201d Glazier says. \u201cUnfortunately, some bad actors \u2014 like Midjourney \u2014 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAI models like Midjourney are \u201ctrained\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tAI firms argue such training is legal \u201cfair use,\u201d transforming all those old \u201cinputs\u201d into entirely new \u201coutputs.\u201d Whether that argument succeeds in court is a potentially trillion-dollar question \u2014 and one that has yet to be definitively answered by federal judges.<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney and Universal\u2019s new lawsuit against Midjourney is the latest such case \u2014 and immediately one of the most high-profile. The 110-page lawsuit claims the startup \u201chelped itself\u201d to vast amounts of copyrighted content, allowing its users to create images that \u201cblatantly incorporate and copy Disney\u2019s and Universal\u2019s famous characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cMidjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,\u201d the companies wrote in their complaint, lodged in Los Angeles federal court on Wednesday morning.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 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 \u201cunimaginable scale\u201d to build models that are \u201ctrampling the rights of copyright owners.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMusic publishers have filed their own case, accusing Anthropic of infringing copyrighted song lyrics with its Claude model. Numerous other artists and creative industries \u2014 from newspapers to photographers to visual artists to software coders \u2014 have launched similar cases.<\/p>\n

\n\tDisney and Universal\u2019s complaint makes the same basic argument \u2014 that using copyrighted works to train AI is illegal \u2014 but does so by citing some of the most iconic movie and TV characters in history. Disney cites Darth Vader from Star Wars<\/em>, \u00a0Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story<\/em> and Homer Simpson from The Simpsons<\/em>; Universal mentions Shrek, the Minions, Kung Fu Panda and others.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPiracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,\u201d lawyers for the studios write. \u201cMidjourney\u2019s conduct misappropriates Disney\u2019s and Universal\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The RIAA is throwing its support behind a blockbuster copyright lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal against artificial intelligence firm Midjourney, calling the case \u201ca critical stand for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6434,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[6267,2184,1423,303,178,2501],"class_list":["post-6433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-applauded","tag-disney","tag-labels","tag-lawsuit","tag-record","tag-universal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}