Warner Bros. is suing San Francisco-based AI firm Midjourney for allegedly letting users generate copyrighted characters like Superman and Bugs Bunny.
It’s the third major studio, after Disney and Universal, to file a lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court. The lawsuit claims Midjourney used “illegal copies” of Warner Bros. works to train its AI and encourages users to create images and videos of characters from Looney Tunes and the Scooby-Doo series. Even generic prompts, it says, produce high-quality depictions of DC heroes such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash.
Warner Bros. argues that Midjourney “thinks it is above the law” and could easily curb copyright abuse just as it restricts content involving violence or nudity. The lawsuit claims Midjourney’s practices create consumer confusion by misleading subscribers into believing its mass copying and the countless infringing images and videos are authorized by Warner Bros. Discovery. The company also says these violations entitle it to damages of up to $150,000 for each infringed work.
In the Disney and Universal cases, Midjourney denied infringement, arguing in an August filing that training on billions of public images was necessary to teach its AI visual concepts and their link to language. Midjourney also claimed users are responsible for following its terms of use, which ban copyright infringement.
“Training a generative AI model to understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use – a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have considered the issue,” said Midjourney’s response, citing recent court rulings in lawsuits by published authors against Anthropic and Facebook parent Meta.
In a 2022 Associated Press interview, Midjourney CEO David Holz likened the service to a search engine drawing from internet images and said copyright laws should adapt to AI as they have to human creativity.
“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”
Warner Bros is suing AI company Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement
• The lawsuit cites multiple AI-generated examples of Batman and other iconic characters
• WB is seeking $150K per infringed work
• They argue generating copyrighted characters is a ‘clear draw’… pic.twitter.com/2xwI5oTJpA
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