Midjourney asks court to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose their own AI training practices

Midjourney has asked a federal court to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. — the three studios suing it for copyright infringement — to disclose their own internal generative AI training practices, arguing the studios may be doing behind closed doors exactly what they accuse Midjourney of doing.

What's new

In a motion filed this week, Midjourney's lawyers urged Judge John Kronstadt to overturn an earlier magistrate judge's ruling that limited the studios' discovery obligations to AI use that led to "consumer-facing" videos and images. TechCrunch reports that "as part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves."

Midjourney is seeking the studios' AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, and even internal board presentations about AI. Its filing argues the "documents [the studios] are withholding are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing."

The studios' lead attorney, David Singer, has pushed back, characterizing the request as a fishing expedition: the studios "do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney's business," but rather "simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows."

Context

Disney and Universal sued Midjourney last year over its models' ability to generate images of copyrighted characters such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader; Warner Bros. filed a similar suit months later, and the cases have since been consolidated before Judge Kronstadt. Midjourney's core defense is that training on publicly available images, including those depicting copyrighted characters, is protected under fair use — and it has increasingly leaned on an "unclean hands" argument, contending that if the studios use similar unlicensed AI training internally for storyboarding or ideation, that undercuts their infringement claims.

Why it matters

The discovery fight is a proxy battle over what counts as acceptable AI training practice in an industry where the line between "research use" and "product use" is often blurry. If Midjourney succeeds in forcing the studios to open their internal AI workflows to scrutiny, the resulting record could become a reference point in other generative-AI copyright suits — either validating the industry-custom defense or handing plaintiffs' lawyers a playbook for what discovery requests to expect when they sue AI companies.