Midjourney is fighting to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose how they use AI internally, arguing the studios may be doing the very thing they’re suing over. It’s a discovery battle inside a landmark copyright case, and a coming ruling could reshape AI lawsuits industry-wide.

Key Takeaways

• Midjourney wants the studios to reveal internal AI practices
• The studios sued Midjourney for copyright infringement in 2025
• A June ruling limited disclosure to “consumer-facing” AI only
• Midjourney’s defense rests on fair use and “unclean hands”
• Judge Kronstadt’s ruling could set a precedent for AI cases

The Lawsuit Behind the Fight

The roots go back to 2025. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for copyright infringement that June, pointing out that the startup’s models could generate images of characters they own, such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader.

Warner Bros. followed a few months later. Its September suit added its own roster of icons, including Batman and Superman, to the pile of allegedly infringing output.

The stakes are steep. The studios are seeking an injunction to halt the alleged infringement plus statutory damages that could reach up to $150,000 per work for willful violations, a figure that multiplies fast across a catalog of famous characters.

The case has now moved into discovery, the pre-trial phase where each side has to hand over relevant documents. That’s where the current fight is playing out.

What Midjourney Is Demanding

Midjourney wants a deep look inside the studios’ AI operations. Its request covers business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, and even the presentations the companies used in board meetings about generative AI.

It goes further on Midjourney’s own service. The startup argues the studios should reveal all the prompts they used in Midjourney, along with the resulting outputs, not just the prompts that produced the images the studios flagged as infringing.

The trigger for this motion was a setback. In a June 15 ruling, Magistrate Judge Joel Richlin denied Midjourney’s bid for broad access, finding it irrelevant to whether Midjourney infringed and limiting the studios’ disclosures to consumer-facing AI applications.

Now Midjourney wants that overturned. It argues the limit unfairly lets the studios cherry-pick only the documents that help them, and asks Judge John Kronstadt to widen the scope.

The Fair Use and “Unclean Hands” Strategy

Midjourney’s defense runs on two tracks. The first is fair use, the argument that training AI models on publicly available images is legally permissible, much like a human artist absorbing influences.

The second is sharper. Midjourney invokes the unclean hands doctrine, the idea that a party doing the very thing it’s suing over shouldn’t be able to win. If the studios train their own models on unlicensed copyrighted work, the reasoning goes, their case weakens.

The company’s lawyer put it plainly. As attorney Bobby Ghajar wrote, if the studios are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses.

The internal-use angle is the crux. Midjourney contends that if a studio builds image-generating tools for storyboarding or ideating content, that alone would show it’s an industry custom, even among the plaintiffs, to train AI on unlicensed material.

The Studios’ Pushback

The studios aren’t buying it. Their lead attorney, David Singer, has dismissed the demand as a fishing expedition for documents unrelated to the actual dispute.

Their framing is narrow by design. Singer argued the studios aren’t trying to stop AI technology or shut down Midjourney’s business. They simply want it to stop copying their movies and shows and creating derivative works featuring their characters without authorization, the same right any copyright holder would assert.

Yet Hollywood’s own AI ambitions complicate the picture. Disney has been the most open of the three, having announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI in late 2025 that would have brought hundreds of Disney characters to the Sora platform.

That deal didn’t survive. The plans fell apart after Sora was shut down, with Disney saying it would still engage with AI platforms that respect IP and creators’ rights. What that engagement looks like may hinge on what this very lawsuit turns up.

Why the Ruling Matters Beyond This Case

This procedural skirmish carries weight far past Midjourney. Judge Kronstadt’s decision on whether to uphold or overturn Richlin’s order could set a template for how discovery works in AI copyright fights.

The legal ground is already unsettled. US courts are split on AI fair use, and how judges handle what evidence defendants can gather will shape the playing field for future cases.

The ripple effect could be large. A win for Midjourney hands every future defendant a powerful tool: the ability to probe whether the companies accusing them of harm are quietly doing the same thing. The outcome could touch dozens of similar suits now working through the courts.

For now, the question sits with the federal court. Whether Midjourney gets to pull back the curtain on Hollywood’s AI habits, or stays boxed into the narrower consumer-facing scope, will say a lot about where these battles head next.

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