Midjourney Asks Court to Revisit Ruling in Disney, Universal and Warner Bros AI Copyright Fight
Midjourney is pressing a California federal court to reopen a dispute over what the Hollywood studios themselves are doing with artificial intelligence. The image-generating company has filed a motion asking the court to review a mid-June ruling that denied its request for Disney, Universal and Warner Bros to disclose how they use AI internally.
The studios, which own copyrights tied to characters and franchises including Superman, Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, Bart Simpson, Yoda and Darth Vader, sued Midjourney in 2025. They allege that the company trained its image generator on publicly available images and enabled users to produce copyrighted characters through prompts.
In its filing submitted on 29 June, Midjourney argues that the studios’ own AI practices could matter to the case. If the companies are “themselves training generative-AI models on third-party copyrighted works, scraping the internet and investing in tools that do the same,” Midjourney says, that would be “powerful evidence” that such conduct is considered fair use within the industry. The company also contends that the studios are “engaging in the very conduct they complained about.”
The studios’ lead lawyer, David Singer, has previously dismissed the request as a “fishing expedition” meant to distract from Midjourney’s own conduct.
The legal stakes extend well beyond one image generator. US copyright law’s fair-use doctrine turns on factors including the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, how much was copied and the effect on the market for the original. Midjourney says its use of copyrighted material falls within “industry custom and practice,” and it has also argued that the studios’ “own unlicensed download and copying of millions of images” amounted to copyright violations and showed “unclean hands.”
The company’s filing points to other generative-AI cases in which courts have described fair use as an unsettled area of law. That uncertainty, Midjourney argues, should make judges reluctant to limit evidence before the fair-use question is fully tested.
It remains unclear when the US district court in California will rule on the motion. But the case is part of a widening legal test over how copyright law will apply to generative AI, and the outcome could shape disputes far beyond Hollywood.
