Warner Bros. sues Midjourney for generating Batman and other characters

Warner Bros. Discovery has filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing the popular AI image generator of intentional copyright infringement.

What happened:

Midjourney, according to Warner Bros., allows users to create images and videos with the company's copyrighted characters, such as Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo, Bugs Bunny, and others. The service offers a paid subscription ($10-$120/month), and Warner claims that the ability to generate their characters is a key attraction for users.

Initially, Midjourney blocked requests for videos with WB characters, but recently, according to the lawsuit, these restrictions were lifted, and users were promised fewer blocked requests. The lawsuit draws comparisons between images created by Midjourney and official footage from films such as The Dark Knight.

What is Warner Bros. demanding?

Warner Bros. is seeking damages of up to $150,000 for each copyright infringement. According to the company's lawyers, it is difficult to imagine a more intentional copyright infringement than what Midjourney is doing.

Context:

This is not the first lawsuit against Midjourney - Disney and Universal Studios also accuse the service of using their characters (Star Wars, Shrek, The Simpsons, etc.) to train AI models.

It is the developed institution of copyright and related rights protection that has become the subject of discussions of the current White House administration. Currently, the laws require the consent of the copyright holder for any use of intellectual property, including neural network training. However, all major products have already been found to be using data for training without the consent of the rights holders. It is likely that the multibillion-dollar corporations behind these products are putting pressure on the US administration to cancel the copyright for neural network training. According to them, if this is not done, there will be NATO troops there tomorrow, and Chinese neural networks like DeepSeek may gain a competitive advantage because they do not follow the letter of the law.