Warner Bros. sues Midjourney to stop AI knockoffs of Batman, Scooby-Doo

Warner Bros. hit Midjourney with a lawsuit Thursday, crafting a complaint that strives to shoot down defenses that the AI company has already raised in a similar lawsuit filed by Disney and Universal Studios earlier this year.

The big film studios have alleged that Midjourney profits off image generation models trained to produce outputs of popular characters. For Disney and Universal, intellectual property rights to pop icons like Darth Vader and the Simpsons were allegedly infringed. And now, the WB complaint defends rights over comic characters like Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman, as well as characters considered "pillars of pop culture with a lasting impact on generations," like Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny, and modern cartoon characters like Rick and Morty.

"Midjourney brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property as if it were its own," the WB complaint said, accusing Midjourney of allowing subscribers to "pick iconic" copyrighted characters and generate them in "every imaginable scene."

Planning to seize Midjourney's profits from allegedly using beloved characters to promote its service, Warner Bros. described Midjourney as "defiant and undeterred" by the Disney/Universal lawsuit. Despite that litigation, WB claimed that Midjourney has recently removed copyright protections in its supposedly shameful ongoing bid for profits. Nothing but a permanent injunction will end Midjourney's outputs of allegedly "countless infringing images," WB argued, branding Midjourney's alleged infringements as "vast, intentional, and unrelenting."

Examples of closely matching outputs include prompts for "screencaps" showing specific movie frames, a search term that at least one artist, Reid Southen, had optimistically predicted Midjourney would block last year, but it apparently did not.

Here are some examples included in WB's complaint:

Midjourney could face devastating financial consequences in a loss. At trial, WB is hoping discovery will show the true extent of Midjourney's alleged infringement, asking the court for maximum statutory damages, at $150,000 per infringing output. Just 2,000 infringing outputs unearthed could cost Midjourney more than its total revenue for 2024, which was approximately $300 million, the WB complaint said.