ComputerWorld.com reported that “In a move that could redefine the boundaries between generative AI (genAI) and intellectual property, Disney and Universal have joined forces to file a lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the world’s most popular AI image generators.” The June 20, 2025 article entitled “Disney and Universal vs. Midjourney: A landmark copyright fight over genAI” (https://www.computerworld.com/article/4008477/disney-and-universal-vs-midjourney-a-landmark-copyright-fight-over-genai.html) included these comments:
Disney and Universal allege that Midjourney’s platform is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” With Midjourney, all a subscriber need do to create unauthorized images of iconic characters such as Darth Vader, Elsa, the Minions, Shrek, and many others is to type in a prompt.
In the company’s defense — if you can call it that — Midjourney CEO David Holz is on record as saying his AI has been trained on “just a big scrape of the Internet.” What about copyrights on these images?
“There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry. There’s no way to find a picture on the Internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.”
I think when it comes to Disney, it’s pretty darn obvious who owns the images. I mean, this is Disney, the big bad wolf of copyright. After Walt Disney lost the copyright to his earlier character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, he made darn sure that, starting with Mickey Mouse in 1928, he’d lock down its intellectual property for as close to forever as he could.
This will be an interesting case to follow!!
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/landmark-copyright-infringement-case-over-genai