As part of an ongoing legal battle with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to force those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement last year, noting that the startup’s image-making models could create images of characters such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader owned by the studios. A few months later, Warner Bros. also sued Midjourney.
The startup argues that training its AI models on copyrighted character images is allowed under fair use.
The current controversy revolves around what documentation the studios will need to produce during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that studios would indeed have to provide information about the use of artificial intelligence being created – but only when it led to videos and images that consumers “see”.
In his last depositionMidjourney seeks to overturn this restriction, arguing that it “unfairly” allows studios to “select only those documents they believe support their claims of market harm, while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.”
Midjourney goes on to argue that the “documents [the studios] it’s exactly what would be revealed if, behind closed doors, they do exactly what they’re suing Midjourney for.”
For example, the startup says that if studios develop AI models that generate images “for internal use in storyboarding or ideological content for film or television, this evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among studios themselves, to download and train AI on copyrighted content without permission.”
In the filing, the startup also argues that studios should disclose all the messages they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting results, not just the messages that produced the allegedly infringing images.
The main lawyer for the studios David Singer previously claimed that Midjourney was looking for this documentation as part of a “fishing expedition”.
He also said the studios “are not seeking to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business” but “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly screening, publicly displaying and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] unlicensed famous characters’.
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