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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 3
  • Research debt items: 3

Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Midjourney, Inc.

Summary

Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Midjourney, Inc., No. 2:25-cv-05275 (C.D. Cal.), is studio copyright litigation over Midjourney’s image (and planned video) generation service. Disney and Universal filed on June 11, 2025, alleging direct and secondary infringement of character works. A later Warner Bros. Discovery action was consolidated into the Disney docket for all purposes including trial. As of the June 15, 2026 discovery order, the case had no fair-use merits ruling.

Verified Facts

  • Disney Enterprises, Inc., Marvel Characters, Inc., MVL Film Finance LLC, Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Universal City Studios Productions LLLP, and DreamWorks Animation L.L.C. filed a complaint on June 11, 2025, against Midjourney, Inc. in the Central District of California, No. 2:25-cv-05275.1
  • The complaint pleads direct copyright infringement and secondary copyright infringement and demands a jury trial. It alleges that Midjourney’s commercial image service generates unauthorized copies and derivatives of plaintiffs’ characters, including examples such as Darth Vader, Elsa, Lightning McQueen, Buzz Lightyear, Iron Man, and Homer Simpson, and that Midjourney ignored cease-and-desist correspondence.1
  • Plaintiffs allege they never authorized Midjourney to reproduce, display, distribute, or make derivatives of the works listed in Exhibits A and B, and they seek damages or statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) and injunctive relief.1
  • Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., DC Comics, Turner Entertainment Co., Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., and The Cartoon Network, Inc. filed a second action, No. 2:25-cv-08376. The parties stipulated to consolidate that action into No. 2:25-cv-05275 for all purposes including trial.2
  • On June 15, 2026, Magistrate Judge A. Joel Richlin granted in part and denied in part Midjourney’s motion to compel. The order directed plaintiffs to produce documents sufficient to show approval of generative-AI image or video outputs intended for consumers featuring the asserted works, and limited development/training production to that same consumer-facing scope. It otherwise denied the motion, including broader AI-strategy discovery and unused complaint-investigation prompts as work product.2

Historical Context

Disney is the leading Hollywood character-output case. It is adjacent to Andersen v. Stability AI, which is an artist class action about training copies and style, but this docket is about recognizable studio characters as outputs of a commercial generator.12

Jurisdiction: Central District of California. Authority level: complaint plus a magistrate discovery order. No source cited here decides § 107 or substantial similarity on the merits.12

The studios’ theory combines training-copy allegations with output substitution: the product is alleged to function as a “vending machine” for unauthorized character images.1 The discovery order treats the studios’ own consumer-facing AI use as potentially relevant while refusing a wide inquiry into internal AI development and unused lawyer-generated prompts.2 That is case-management, not a holding that studio AI use defeats infringement.

This page does not treat complaint exhibits of generated character images as proven copying.

Relationships

  • CASE-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY cites SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-COMPLAINT.
  • CASE-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.
  • CASE-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY related_to CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY.

Sources

  1. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-COMPLAINT: Disney/Universal complaint (June 11, 2025).
  2. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-MTC-2026: Order on motion to compel (June 15, 2026).

Research Debt

  • Add the Warner Bros. original complaint and the November 2025 consolidation order as dedicated sources.
  • Add any district-judge review of the June 15, 2026 discovery order from that motion and ruling.
  • Add any later fair-use, substantial-similarity, or summary-judgment order.

Document metadata

  • Filing date: 2025-06-11
  • Last verified: 2026-09-02

  1. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-COMPLAINT — Complaint (June 11, 2025). Plaintiff allegations and original parties. ↩↩↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-MTC-2026 — Order (June 15, 2026). Primary for consolidation, Warner Bros. Discovery parties, and discovery holdings. ↩↩↩↩↩