AI image generator Midjourney is trying to turn the tables on Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. by demanding they show their own AI homework. The studios would very much rather not.
Disney and Universal sued the AI image generator last year, later joined by Warner Bros. Discovery, accusing Midjourney of building a machine that lets anyone conjure up Shrek, Spider-Man, or any other protected character with a few keystrokes. The studios call it infringement at scale.
Midjourney's defence rests on two pillars: that its outputs are protected fair use, and that the studios themselves are hardly innocent bystanders in the AI gold rush. So during discovery — the pre-trial phase where both sides have to hand over evidence — Midjourney went looking for receipts.
Specifically, it wants the studios' AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, and internal documents on how AI gets used to make and market their movies and shows. It's also asked for board presentations where studio executives discuss AI strategy.
The legal logic here is what's known as an ‘unclean hands’ defense which is essentially, an argument that the plaintiffs are up to their own version of the alleged misconduct while suing someone else for it. As Midjourney put it in a filing, if the studios are doing the same thing they're accusing Midjourney of, that goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defences.
Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. have agreed to disclose information about their consumer-facing AI tools — think customer chatbots or public-facing features — but have drawn a hard line at anything internal. No research labs, no storyboarding tools, no boardroom AI strategy decks.
A magistrate judge sided with them in June. Judge Joel Richlin ruled that Midjourney's broader requests weren't relevant to the core question of whether the company infringed the studios' copyrights, limiting discovery to consumer-facing applications only.
This week, Midjourney’s lawyers filed a motion asking the presiding judge, John Kronstadt, to overturn the ruling and force the studios to open up further.
The studios’ attorney, David Singer, has dismissed the whole manoeuver as a distraction tactic, framing the case in simpler terms: “Plaintiffs simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of Plaintiffs’ famous characters without authorisation.”
It's arguably the first heavyweight courtroom collision between traditional Hollywood and the generative AI industry, and the stakes are real. The studios are reportedly seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 per infringed work, a number that could scale into company-ending territory for Midjourney given how many images are allegedly at issue.
The discovery fight itself could set a precedent with implications well beyond this case. If Midjourney succeeds in forcing the studios to expose their internal AI practices, it could hand ammunition not just to Midjourney but to every other AI company currently fighting similar copyright battles — including the ongoing suits against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stability AI. If it fails, it reinforces that “you do it too” isn't a winning courtroom argument, no matter how true it might be.
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