Batman and Scooby-Doo have a new task: stay clear of Midjourney. Warner Bros. Discovery is suing artificial intelligence image generator Midjourney for copyright infringement. Disney and Universal Studios made similar complaints earlier this year.
The big film studios allege Midjourney profits from image generation models trained to produce outputs of popular characters. The Warner Bros. complaint seeks to defend rights over comic icons like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, along with Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny.
Filed in the Los Angeles federal court, Warner Bros. said the “theft” allowed Midjourney to train its image and video service to give subscribers high-quality, downloadable images of its characters in "every imaginable scene.”
Launched in 2022 and led by founder David Holz, San Francisco-based Midjourney had nearly 21 million users by September 2024 and earned an estimated $300 million in 2024, the complaint said.
AI companies have trained technology on data scraped across the Internet without compensating creators. This has triggered lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organisations, artists, and studios.
Last week, Anthropic, a leading AI company, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.
