Posts Tagged: "Midjourney"

Last week, a coalition of entertainment companies filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, an AI company that builds generative tools using publicly available data. These lawsuits follow similar actions against other leading AI firms. The strategy is clear: ensnare AI startups under an avalanche of litigation before they can challenge entrenched business models. If established media wins this battle, it won’t just hurt AI companies—it will harm the millions of American businesses and consumers who stand to benefit from the most transformative technology since the internet itself.

In a moment that was both inevitable and seismic, Disney and Universal filed a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit against Midjourney, a leading generative AI company specializing in image and video synthesis. The studios claim that Midjourney trained its generative models on copyrighted characters, including Yoda, Bart Simpson, Iron Man, Shrek, and others, without authorization, and facilitated public generation of derivative works through its platform.

Disney Enterprises, Inc. et. al. and Universal City Studios Productions LLLP, et. al. filed a complaint today with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the AI image generator, Midjourney. The suit accuses Midjourney of being a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” According to the plaintiffs, Midjourney could have stopped the infringement and copying of their copyrighted works at any time—either by controlling the data used to train, by controlling the prompts users input, or via technological protection measures—but chose not to and failed to respond to letters informing them of the infringement prior to the lawsuit.

Jason Allen, the author of the two-dimensional digital artwork, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” which was rejected by the U.S. Copyright Office last year, has filed a request for declaratory judgment with the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado asking the court to find that his work is eligible for copyright registration. The Review Board of the U.S. Copyright Office published a final decision denying registration of Allen’s work in September 2023. The work was created using the generative artificial intelligence (GAI) system, Midjourney.

 On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California filed an order granting in part and denying in part motions to dismiss the first amended complaint in Andersen v. Stability AI LTD, a critical lawsuit which may pin down several issues relating to generative artificial intelligence (GAI) platforms. The allegations stem from a complaint against four technology companies for incorporating the AI software product Stable Diffusion into their individual platforms. The Plaintiffs, consisting of several artists, alleged that their copyrighted works were scraped in a large-scale dataset to be used as “training images” for the software, which then outputted images “in the style” of those copyrighted works.   

Earlier this week, the Review Board of the U.S. Copyright Office published a decision denying registration of a work created using the generative artificial intelligence (GAI) system, Midjourney, highlighting the complexities such technology is introducing to the U.S. copyright system…. The decision issued this week found that Jason M. Allen’s two-dimensional artwork, titled “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial,” contained “more than a de minimis amount” of AI-created content and that the AI content must therefore be disclaimed.

On May 18, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court answered an exceedingly narrow question of copyright law with potentially sweeping impact: did the purpose and character of Andy Warhol’s below ‘Orange Prince’ work—as used on a 2016 Condé Nast magazine cover—support fair use of Lynn Goldsmith’s photograph of famed musician Prince Rogers Nelson a/k/a Prince?  In a 7-2 decision, the Court found that it does not, calling into question nearly 30 years of fair use jurisprudence, arguably narrowing the scope of that doctrine, and potentially threatening disciplines that rely on it, e.g., appropriation art. The decision is also sure to impact generative artificial intelligence (“AI”), an emerging technology that is also likely to rely heavily on fair use.

On Monday, January 23, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) Copyright Public Records System (CPRS) reflected that the registration for a graphic novel that was made using the AI text-to-image tool, Midjourney, had been cancelled. The Office has since clarified that the update was a system error (see above note). The USCO previously registered the work in September 2022. However, a month later, and following significant press attention, the Office issued a notice indicating that the registration may be cancelled. With Monday’s development, the cancellation seemed to be final.