"Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing," said Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez in a statement. The studios claim Midjourney downloaded copyrighted content from the Internet using "bots, scrapers, streamrippers, video downloaders, and web crawlers" to train its AI model.

A trial involving Getty Images and Stability AI began in London’s High Court in June 2025; does it point at a bigger problem between technology and fair use?

Disney and Universal have filed a copyright lawsuit against popular artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney on Wednesday, marking the first time major Hollywood companies have enter the legal battle over generative AI.