On September 4, Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) filed a Complaint in a US federal court, claiming that Midjourney had been engaging in widespread copyright infringement. The lawsuit is very similar to a June Complaint filed by Disney and Universal: both of them show examples of Midjourney-generated content depicting characters that in some cases are virtually indistinguishable from the studios’ original works.
Midjourney, the Complaint alleges, both has control over which content it selects, aggregates, copies and uses to train its generative AI algorithms. Furthermore, “Midjourney also controls the outputs of its image and video Service, and it has the means to implement protection measures to prevent the ongoing reproduction, public display, public performance, and distribution of Warner Bros. Discovery’s works;” and notes that Midjourney has the technological means to prevent illegal distribution.
Below is an excerpt from the Complaint’s 14-page Exhibit A, which lists works that WBD contends were infringed by Midjourney:
“Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Bugs Bunny, and Scooby-Doo. These are some of the most popular and valuable fictional characters ever created, and they (and many other characters) are owned by Warner Bros. Discovery… and only Warner Bros. Discover has the right under U.S. Copyright law to build a business around (them)” began the Introduction. The WBD Complaint listed Warner Bros. Entertainment, DC Comics, Turner Entertainment Co, Hanna-Barbera Productions and the Cartoon Network as the Plaintiffs.
Full knowledge
Midjourney was founded in 2021 as a generative AI service. While it is a privately held company, its revenue was estimated by Demandsage to have exceeded $200 million and $300 million in 2024. According to statistics accessed in September 2025, it had about 21 million registered users.
In the Complaint, WBD contended that Midjourney had full knowledge of this situation, and provided examples not only of infringing instances of WBD content but also examples of Midjourney features that evolved over time and that “Midjourney could only do this because it recognizes that its Service’s outputs infringe Warner Bros. Discovery’s copyrights.
“Despite its knowledge of its infringing outputs of Warner Bros. Discovery’s copyrighted works, Midjourney remains defiant and undeterred. If a Midjourney subscriber submits a simple text prompt requesting an image of Superman in a particular setting or doing a particular action”
Not only were the images generated recognizeable; ” The outputs often contain extensive nuance and detail, background elements, costumes, and accessories beyond what was specified in the prompt. …Midjourney is able to reproduce, publicly display, publicly perform, and distribute these copies because Midjourney selected and copied Warner Bros. Discovery’s Copyrighted Works as part of the training process for its Service.”
WBD contended that Midjourney gathered WBD’s copyrighted works by downloading them from the Internet … using tools variously described as bots, scrapers, streamrippers, video downloaders, and web crawlers.
The lawsuit quotes Midjourney’s founder, from an August 2022 interview by The Verge, as saying that Midjourney, “grabs everything they can, they dump it in a huge file, and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing.”
Asked by Forbes in September 2022 as to whether Midjourney sought consent to use work under copyright, he answered “No. There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry.”
In fact, there are many technological methods to determine sources and ownership; as Piracy Monitor readers know.
Copyright enforcement
The lawsuit claims that Midjourney committed both direct copyright infringement (by reproducing, displaying, distributing WBD’s copyrighted works), and secondary infringement (that Midjourney’s contributed to infringement by its users).
WBD considers each generated content item to be an infringing instance, and that each infringed work entitles WBD to damages plus proven profits. Alternatively, WBD would be entitled to statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work.
Further reading
Complaint for direct copyright infringement and secondary copyright infringement; demand for jury trial. Case# 2:25-cv-08376-JAK-E. Document #1 Complaint. US District Court for the Central District of California.
‘An engine for the imagination’: the rise of AI image generators. An interview with Midjourney founder David Holz. Article. August 2, 2022, by James Vincent. The Verge
Midjourney founder David Holz on the impact of AI on art, imagination and the creative economy. Article. September 16, 2025. by Rob Salkowitz. Forbes
Why it matters
This lawsuit illustrates that the Hollywood community has stepped up its efforts to aggressively defend its intellectual property. Why now? While it takes time to recognize the situation and build up a body of evidence, the examples provided in the Complaints are too blatant to ignore.
Midjourney’s CEO had told Forbes that “It’s important to emphasize that this is not about art. This is about imagination. Imagination is sometimes used for art but it’s often not. Most of the images created on Midjourney aren’t being used professionally. They aren’t even being shared. They’re just being used for these other purposes, these very human needs.”
Commenting on the matter, Charles Rivkin, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) said that “The Motion Picture Association strongly supports copyright protection and our member company efforts to enforce intellectual property rights. We remain concerned that copyright infringement, left unchecked, threatens the entire American motion picture industry, which supports over 2 million jobs in all 50 states and drives countless economic, social, and cultural benefits.”
