Midjourney vs. Hollywood: AI Startup Demands Studios Reveal Their Own AI Usage:
Copyright Discovery Fight Could Expose How Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Use Generative AI Internally.
3: MAJOR STUDIOS IN LITIGATION
2025–26: LAWSUITS FILED AND ONGOING
1 RULING: DISCOVERY SCOPE UNDER APPEAL
1: The Lawsuits That Started It All:
A widening legal battle between Hollywood's biggest studios and one of AI's most popular image generators is now entering a critical discovery phase.
Disney and Universal jointly sued Midjourney last year, alleging that the AI startup's models could generate recognizable, copyrighted characters — including Bart Simpson and Darth Vader — without authorization. A few months later, Warner Bros. filed its own suit, adding characters like Superman and Batman to the growing list of allegedly infringed intellectual property.
Midjourney has consistently defended its practices by arguing that training generative AI models on copyrighted images qualifies as fair use — a legal theory that remains one of the most contested and unresolved questions in AI copyright law today.
2: What Midjourney Is Now Demanding:
The current phase of the dispute isn't about the underlying infringement claims — it's about what evidence each side has to produce during discovery.
A judge previously ruled that the studios must disclose information about their own generative AI usage, but limited that obligation to AI activity resulting in “consumer-facing” videos and images. In its latest filing, Midjourney is asking the court to remove that limitation entirely.
The current limitation “unfairly” lets studios cherry-pick documents supporting their own claims while withholding evidence favorable to Midjourney's defense.
— Midjourney, court filing
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Midjourney argues that if studios are using generative AI models internally — for storyboarding or early-stage content ideation, for example — that would demonstrate that training AI on unlicensed copyrighted material is standard industry practice, even among the studios bringing the lawsuits. The startup is also pushing for full disclosure of every prompt studios have run through Midjourney's own platform, along with the resulting outputs, rather than only the prompts studios have flagged as infringing.
3: The Studios' Pushback:
Not surprisingly, the studios' legal team sees this discovery request very differently. David Singer, lead attorney for the studios, has characterized Midjourney's discovery demands as a broad, speculative search for unrelated information rather than a targeted effort to build a legitimate defense.
Singer has also stated publicly that the studios are not trying to halt AI technology altogether or shut down Midjourney's business — their goal, he says, is simply to stop the unauthorized reproduction and distribution of their copyrighted characters.
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4: Why This Discovery Fight Matters for Every Business Using AI:
This isn't just a Hollywood story — it's a preview of the accountability standard every company using generative AI may soon face.
Whether or not the studios' own internal AI usage ever becomes public record, the underlying tension is one that applies well beyond entertainment: as generative AI tools become embedded in everyday business workflows, organizations are increasingly expected to know exactly how those tools are being used, what data trained them, and whether that usage is licensed and defensible.
Companies that treat AI adoption as informal, undocumented, or improvised are the ones most exposed when legal or regulatory scrutiny arrives. The organizations built to withstand that scrutiny are the ones with governed, auditable AI systems from day one.
Don't Let AI Governance Become Your Company's Next Legal Exposure.
The Midjourney-Hollywood discovery fight is a reminder that undocumented, ad hoc AI usage inside an organization can become a liability the moment it's scrutinized. Agent+ gives your team a governed, auditable AI workflow platform — so every generative AI interaction across your business is tracked, licensed, and defensible by design, not reconstructed after a subpoena.
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