Major media companies such as Disney, Marvel, Universal, and others have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney. The main claim is mass use of external images without permission. The case involves famous characters: Yoda, Shrek, Minions, Spider-Man. This historic legal proceeding will demonstrate that image generation based on prompts can be considered a direct copyright infringement.
What’s next?
The competition over copyright has ended — this is no longer just a complaint but a large-scale attack on the concept of fair use in the era of artificial intelligence and generative models. If Hollywood wins, any startup that trained its model on publicly available internet data risks being classified as a pirate retroactively.
Midjourney is just the beginning. Everything is at risk: video generation, music creation, 3D modeling, voice synthesis.
If this company prevails, the established system of exclusive rights to visual styles and images will collapse. Access to such creative work will become open to everyone — from small startups to freelancers with laptops.
But if the court rules in favor of the industry, artists and developers will have to deal with cumbersome licenses, the use of closed datasets, and ongoing legal battles. Progress cannot be stopped, but it will be much slower and significantly more expensive.