Key Points
- Midjourney faces copyright suits from Disney and Universal (2025) and Warner Bros. (September 2025).
- It asked the court to compel the studios to disclose their own generative-AI use.
- A judge had limited that disclosure to "consumer-facing" AI outputs.
- Midjourney's fair-use and "unclean hands" defense hinges on the studios' own AI practices.
Midjourney is trying to turn the copyright case against it into a case about its accusers. In a new filing in the lawsuit brought by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros., the AI image startup asked the court to force the studios to reveal exactly how they use generative AI themselves — a discovery gambit designed to blunt the infringement claims.
Midjourney wants the studios' AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, and even the AI presentations prepared for their board meetings, along with every prompt run through Midjourney and its outputs — not just the allegedly infringing images. A judge had already ruled the studios must disclose their gen-AI use, but only where it produced "consumer-facing" videos and images. Midjourney is asking to overturn that limit, arguing it lets the studios "cherry-pick" the documents that support their case.
The logic is a fair-use-plus-hypocrisy argument. Midjourney maintains that training on copyrighted characters is protected fair use, and that if the studios are quietly training their own models on unlicensed content, it undercuts the "market harm" at the center of their suit. "If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney's fair use and unclean hands defenses," wrote Midjourney attorney Bobby Ghajar, per TechCrunch. The studios' counsel, David Singer, counters that they "do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney's business" — only to make it "stop copying their movies and TV shows."
The move is shrewd because it targets the industry's worst-kept secret. Studios have spent two years publicly suing AI firms while privately piloting the same tools for storyboarding, VFX, and ideation, and a discovery order could put that on the record. It rhymes with the broader fight over who owes whom for training data — the same tension behind Wikipedia licensing its corpus to Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon and the mounting legal scrutiny that has reached OpenAI. Whether a court forces Disney to show its own AI homework is the kind of ruling that sets the terms for every studio-versus-model fight to come.
Source: TechCrunch, Engadget.
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