Elsa, is that you?: Disney and Universal Studios sue Midjourney over AI-generated characters

06.23.25

By Miranda Aitken | Journalist & Samantha Ludemann | Associate

On June 11 2025, Disney and Universal Studios filed a landmark copyright infringement lawsuit against AI image generator, Midjourney.

Disney and Universal Studios alleges that Midjourney unlawfully replicates their iconic animations protected by copyright. This includes characters such as Elsa from Frozen, the Minions from Despicable Me and Darth Vader from Star Wars.

For those unfamiliar with the platform, Midjourney is a San Francisco-based AI platform that transforms text prompts into high-quality images within seconds. As of 2025, Midjourney boasts over 19 million users worldwide and has generated significant revenue through its subscription model.

By nature, AI platforms are composed of large streams of information that are fed to it from the internet. As such, these datasets can come from a range of sources which tend to include original and copyrighted works.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism. Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s Chief Legal Officer.

The studios also claim that Midjourney ignored cease-and-desist requests and continued to facilitate the creation of infringing content.

Under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act, the fair use doctrine allows limited use of copyrighted material without permission for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research.

Whether a use qualifies as fair use is determined by weighing four factors, including the purpose and character of the use, the nature of the original work, the amount used, and the effect on the market for the original.

Effectively, the studios argue that Midjourney’s AI models were trained on copyrighted materials without authorisation, leading to the generation of images that are not “sufficiently transformative” to qualify for fair use protection.

As of now, Midjourney has not publicly responded to the lawsuit. In a 2022 interview, CEO David Holz acknowledged that the company used large datasets scraped from the internet for training, stating, “It’s just a big scrape of the internet. We use the open data sets that are published and train across those.”

As Blair Beven from XVII Degrees has suggested, “everyone thinks content on the internet is free to use, but behind the internet is a creator of literary works, website content, photographs, music and computer code which are all protected by copyright laws. It would appear to me that the defence of fair use would fail and that there is no such defence of “we just scraped it from the internet”.

The lawsuit contends that Midjourney’s practices constitute a “bootlegging business model” that undermines the creative industries.

This case could set a significant precedent in the realm of intellectual property law, particularly concerning the regulation of AI-generated content.

As generative AI tools become increasingly prevalent, the outcome of this lawsuit may influence how copyright laws are applied to AI technologies and how companies navigate the balance between innovation and intellectual property rights.

The studios are seeking monetary damages, a jury trial, and an injunction to prevent further infringement.

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Featured Image by PAN XIAOZHEN on Unsplash.

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