Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025 for copyright infringement over AI-generated character images. Warner Bros. joined later. Midjourney’s fair use defense now seeks broader discovery: all prompts used in Midjourney (not just allegedly infringing ones) and studios’ internal AI development beyond consumer-facing outputs.
If studios use AI for internal storyboarding trained on unlicensed copyrighted data, Midjourney argues that evidence supports its defenses. Studios say they seek to stop copying, not AI technology itself. The discovery dispute could set precedent for training-data transparency in generative AI litigation.