Midjourney, Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. walking with in copyright case This time it’s Hollywood’s own artificial intelligence targeted its use. The company wants the studios to submit documents to the court showing how they use generative AI internally. Moreover, Midjourney wants to see not only the images and videos that reach the audience, but also the behind-the-scenes experiments of the studios. This request would expand the focus of the lawsuit from character images to Hollywood’s production processes.
Disney and Universal filed the lawsuit against Midjourney on June 11, 2025, in Los Angeles. Studios claimed that Midjourney’s image production models imitated protected works such as Bart Simpson, Darth Vader, Elsa, Minions, and Marvel characters. A few months later, Warner Bros. Discovery also filed a separate lawsuit with similar allegations. The company included characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Bugs Bunny and Scooby-Doo in the case file.
Midjourney, on the other hand, argues that model training should be evaluated within the scope of “fair use” in US copyright law. The company opposes the approach that considers the use of copyrighted character images as training data as a direct violation. However, the latest application does not limit the defense only to the technical education process. Midjourney wants to make a broader counterargument in court by revealing what studios are doing with their own AI tools.
The current debate centers on what documents studios will share during the discovery process. Magistrate Joel Richlin previously ruled that studios must provide information about their productive use of AI. However, the judge limited this obligation to consumer-facing videos and images only. Midjourney is now requesting that this limit be removed and that internal usage records be included in the file.
Midjourney wants to take studios’ internal AI records to court
Midjourney argues in its latest filing that the current limit gives studios room to cherry-pick documents. The company argues that studios can only share documents that support claims of market harm, while excluding records that could be used to defend them. Those documents could show whether studios were engaging in activities behind closed doors similar to the behavior they accuse Midjourney of, according to the filing. For this reason, the company wants to include internal trials that do not reach the consumer in the court process.
Midjourney refers specifically to the idea development processes used in film and television projects. The company says studios may have developed AI models that generate images for storyboarding, scene testing or visual idea generation. Such a record may indicate that training models with unlicensed copyrighted content is considered a common practice within the industry, according to Midjourney. This argument ensures that the case deals not only with the resulting images but also with the tools in the production chain.
In addition, the company demands all the prompts that the studios use on Midjourney and all the outputs produced by these prompts. Here, he is not just talking about the images in the lawsuit petition that are subject to the alleged violation. Midjourney wants to see all the experiments made by the studios on its platform, with all their successful or unsuccessful results. Thus, the court can examine which characters the studios are trying to produce with which commands over a broader record.
The studios’ lead attorney, David Singer, has previously described this document request as a broad and vague investigative effort. Singer said the studios don’t want to stop AI technology or shut down Midjourney’s business. According to the lawyer, the studios want Midjourney to stop copying movies and television content. Singer also stated that they aim to prevent the company from reproducing famous characters without permission, showing them to the public, performing them in public and producing derivative works.
Case, productive artificial intelligence It has become one of the most visible legal battles between Hollywood royalty. Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. side is taking Midjourney’s unauthorized visual production of popular characters to court. Midjourney, on the other hand, argues that the training data falls within the scope of “fair use” and that the studios’ own use of artificial intelligence is important for defense. If the court expands the discovery limit, studios may also have to disclose artificial intelligence experiments that did not reach the audience.