Erik Hayden at The Hollywood Reporter lays out the facts in this week’s big lawsuit:

In the next chapter of Big Entertainment vs. Big Tech, Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Midjourney over tools that allow users to create images and videos that can manipulate famous characters at the click of a prompt.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Wednesday by Disney Enterprises, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Universal City Studios Productions and DreamWorks Animation, describes the David Holz-run generative AI firm Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The legal salvo marks the first major foray from Hollywood against tech giants that are hoping to reorient consumer habits with personalized entertainment and information by vacuuming up data on the internet and spitting it out in the form of chatbot copy or images.

Anyone looking at the images in the complaint can see that Disney, Universal, and the rest have a strong copyright infringement case here.

No doubt Midjourney will argue A) their ingestion of copyright images is “fair use” and 2) they’re just a tool to create art (it’s the users causing it to regurgitate infringing images!)

Jennifer Zhan at Vulture has a helpful explainer for the lawsuit; in it she notes:

The studios want this case to be decided by a jury trial.

A jury may very well have no choice but to declare infringement on the facts, but I’ll bet good money most people have no problem with what Midjourney is doing.

I’m not saying they’re right, only that America’s jury pools are filled with people sporting a peeing Calvin on their minivan windows and downloading Kung Fu Panda 4 from BitTorrent—they don’t care about copyright, they just want to have fun making pictures of Mickey Mouse as Darth Vader.^[1]

I don’t envy those jurors. They’ll be asked to decide between massive corporations defending their billion dollar portfolios, and an AI company building its business by sucking up those portfolios without permission, and then spitting them back out, just… altered slightly.

A second Hollywood Reporter piece, by Steven Zeitchik, examines the possible outcomes of the lawsuit:

There are several ways the lawsuit unfolds. The most obvious is the way of most lawsuits — with a settlement. In this scenario, Midjourney (and no doubt other AI model operators) pay the studios for their infringement and strike a deal to keep on licensing. (They’re never going to yank studio fare from their models – by the executives’ own words the models would collapse without Big Content.) So AI models keep getting trained on, and spitting our facsimiles of, Hollywood material.

Similarly, studios could simply lose. That nets them less money, but it ends in the same place: OpenAI, Google Gemini and the others crank out Hollywood-trained content at will.

Then there’s the other way: With a studio legal victory. The AI models are deemed prohibited from training on this content — this “fair use,” a judge says, ain’t that. In such a scenario we are ensured that for the indefinite future what gets generated in the way of Hollywood images comes from Hollywood and Hollywood alone.

What does this lead to? Well, it leads to studios continuing to do what they have always done — being the main incubators for and generators of so much of the film, television and other entertainment we consume.

And what does the first option lead to? Well, it hardly takes an imaginative leap to see where we end up if anyone can go to an AI model and plug in prompts to generate stuff that looks a lot like the movies and television we know. It means the end of studios doing it for us.

I know that can seem like a bold statement, but it really isn’t.

Zeitchik posits that if the Hollywood studios lose, they’ll “morph into something else: IP rights managers.” I proposed a similar outcome for Reddit’s own AI lawsuit.

I don’t expect Midjourney will walk away from this unscathed; they’ll pay a crap-ton of money—whether it’s for infringement or licensing doesn’t matter. But the studios are pinning their hopes on jurors who just want to crank out Mickey Mouse memes.