Midjourney is being sued by Warner Bros. Discovery for allegedly infringing on the studio's intellectual property. In a lawsuit filed, Warner Bros. claims that Midjourney infringed on the copyrights of famous characters such as Superman, Batman, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo and more.
The images and videos generated by Midjourney are found to be similar to Warner Bros.' original work with only minor differences. This generative AI also generates images of Warner Bros. characters even though they are not placed in promos by users. In fact, Warner Bros. says Midjourney was aware of the intellectual property customer issue but did not prevent it from continuing to occur.
Microsoft Designer and Google Gemini's generative AI models, for example, prevent the generation of intellectual property images, with users being told why the promo cannot be processed.
Warner Bros. Discovery wants Midjourney to pay compensation for intellectual property infringement and asks the court to prevent them from continuing to copy, display and distribute it. Midjourney is also asked not to offer generative AI services without copyright protection measures.
This is another lawsuit involving intellectual property infringement by Midjourney, which is also being sued by Disney and Universal. Several other generative AI companies such as Meta and Perplexity have also been sued for training their LLM models using copyrighted works of literature.