The studios suing Midjourney say it trained AI on their characters without permission. Midjourney’s answer: prove you do not do exactly the same thing.
The AI image generator wants a US federal judge to intervene. It has asked the court to force the studios suing it to reveal how they use AI internally, Variety reported. It is a sharp turn in a copyright fight that could reshape how AI models are trained.
How we got here
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025. They accused it of enabling mass infringement of characters like Darth Vader, Bart Simpson and Elsa. They called the tool a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” Warner Bros. Discovery joined in September, citing Superman, Batman and Bugs Bunny, and demanding $150,000 for each infringed work. Midjourney’s defence is fair use: training on public images, it says, is legal.
Turning the tables
Now Midjourney wants to see the studios’ homework. In a motion filed this week, it asked Judge John Kronstadt to compel the studios to hand over far more. That means their AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights and board presentations on AI. A magistrate judge had limited disclosure to “consumer-facing” tools in June. Midjourney wants that overturned.
The logic rests on a doctrine called “unclean hands.” Its attorney, Bobby Ghajar, put it bluntly. “If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses,” he wrote. His example: a studio quietly training image models on unlicensed content to storyboard its films. That, he argued, would make the practice an “industry custom.”
The studios push back
The studios call it a stunt. Their lead lawyer, David Singer, dismissed the request as a “fishing expedition.” The studios “do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business,” he wrote. They just want it to stop copying their characters. That, he added, is a right “any copyright holder would assert against any infringer, AI-powered or otherwise.”
The studios are not AI abstainers, though. Disney planned a $1bn deal to put its characters on OpenAI’s Sora, which collapsed after Sora shut down. Disney said it would still work with AI that respects intellectual property. That is the grey area Midjourney is trying to prise open.
Why it matters
The stakes stretch well beyond one case. A ruling that studios must expose their own training data could redraw the line on AI and copyright. It lands at a tense moment. Publishers are suing AI firms, while some rights-holders have quietly struck licensing deals instead.
Courts elsewhere are already testing who is liable for what AI produces. If Midjourney wins its discovery fight, Hollywood’s own AI experiments become evidence. And the tidy story of victim and infringer gets a lot messier.
