Disney (DIS) and NBCUniversal sued an artificial intelligence developer for allegedly infringing on their protected works, the first Hollywood corporate titans to join a mushrooming legal war pitting copyright holders against AI upstarts training their models with data scraped from the internet.
In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday in a Los Angeles Federal District Court, Disney and NBCUniversal said that AI image-creating platform Midjourney pirated images without authorization.
Midjourney obtained copies of Disney’s Star Wars, Minions, and other characters through unauthorized libraries containing works from two Hollywood studios, according to the complaint. Its software allows people to create images from the companies’ popular fictional characters, the suit said.
The companies included AI-generated images of characters ranging from Darth Vader and Buzz Lightyear to the Minions and Spider-Man.
“Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” Disney said in its complaint.
Midjourney did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company is defending itself in another federal case in California brought by artists who allege Midjourney illegally trained its AI image generation models on their copyrighted works.
The latest confrontation expands the number of high-profile cases from copyright holders seeking to guard their works from the reach of technology firms.
A question at the heart of all these lawsuits: Can artificial intelligence companies use copyrighted material to train generative AI models without asking the owner of that data for permission?
Another such clash came earlier this week when social media site Reddit (RDDT) sued AI startup Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), a company backed by tech giants Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOG, GOOGL) that created the AI language model Claude.
Reddit is claiming in the new lawsuit that Anthropic intentionally scraped Reddit users’ personal data without their consent and then put their data to work training Claude.
Reddit said in its complaint that Anthropic “bills itself as the white knight of the AI industry” and argues that “it is anything but.”
Anthropic said last year that it had blocked its bots from Reddit’s website, according to the complaint. But Reddit said Anthropic “continued to hit Reddit’s servers over one hundred thousand times.”
An Anthropic spokesperson said, “We disagree with Reddit’s claims and will defend ourselves vigorously.”
Anthropic is also defending itself against a separate suit from music publishers, including Universal Music Group (0VD.F), ABKCO, and Concord, alleging that Anthropic infringed on copyrights for Beyoncé, the Rolling Stones, and other artists as it trained Claude on lyrics to more than 500 songs.
Courts haven’t settled on a definitive answer to the question of whether artificial intelligence companies can use copyrighted material to train generative AI models without permission.
However, last February, the US District Court for Delaware handed copyright holder Thomson Reuters a win in a case that could impact what data training models can legally collect.
The court granted Thomson Reuters’ request for summary judgment, saying that its competitor, Ross, infringed on its copyrights by using lawsuit summaries to train its AI model.
The court rejected Ross’s argument that it could use the summaries under the concept of fair use, which allows copyrights to be used for news reporting, teaching, research, criticism, and commentary.
Fair use
One big name featuring prominently in some of these clashes is OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), the creator of chatbot ChatGPT that is run by Sam Altman and backed by Microsoft (MSFT).
Comedian Sarah Silverman has accused the companies in a lawsuit of copying material from her book and 7 million pirated works in order to train its AI systems. Parenting website Mumsnet has also accused OpenAI of scraping its six-billion-word database without consent.
But perhaps the most prominent case targeting OpenAI is from the New York Times (NYT), which in 2023 filed a lawsuit accusing OpenAI and Microsoft of illegally using millions of the news outlet’s published stories to train OpenAI’s language models.
The newspaper has said that ChatGPT at times generates query answers that closely mirror its original publications.
Last week, OpenAI called the lawsuit “baseless” and appealed a judge’s recent order in that case requiring the AI developer to preserve “output data” generated by ChatGPT.
OpenAI and Microsoft are using a defense similar to those raised in other AI training copyright disputes: that the Times’ publicly available content falls under the fair use doctrine and, therefore, can be used to train its models.
Getty Images is trying to chip away at that same argument in lawsuits in the US and United Kingdom filed in 2023 against AI image generation startup Stability.
The UK case went to trial on Monday. Stability argues that fair use (or “fair dealing” as it’s known in the UK) justified training its technology, Stable Diffusion, on copyrighted Getty material.
That same defense has hallmarks of justification that Google has been asserting for the past two decades to fight lawsuits claiming it violated copyright laws when pulling information into results for users’ search queries.
In 2005, the Authors Guild sued Google over millions of books that the tech giant scanned and made available in “snippets” to online searchers. Google didn’t pay for the copyrighted information but did provide word-for-word pieces of the copyrighted works in search results.
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reasoned in a decision that Google’s scanning project tested the limits of fair use but was “transformative” and therefore protected under fair use law.
In 2016, Getty Images sued Google over similar claims, alleging that Google violated its copyrights and antitrust law by displaying Getty’s high-resolution images in Google search results.
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