Warner Bros. Discovery sues Midjourney for copyright infringement

Warner Bros. Discovery filed a copyright infringement suit against Midjourney in federal court in Los Angeles, alleging the company’s image and video generator could reliably produce recognisable, unlicensed depictions of its characters — including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo and the Looney Tunes cast. The suit followed similar actions brought against Midjourney by Disney and NBCUniversal earlier in 2025, making Warner Bros. Discovery the third major studio to sue the company.

The complaint alleged that Midjourney had previously restricted subscribers from generating content based on some copyrighted characters but had since relaxed those protections, which the studio characterised as knowing rather than incidental infringement. It sought unspecified damages, disgorgement of profits attributable to the alleged infringement, and an injunction against further generation of the studios’ characters.

Midjourney’s public defence, consistent with its position in the earlier Disney and NBCUniversal cases, rested on fair use: that its models learned general visual concepts from a large corpus of training images rather than storing or directly copying any single copyrighted work, and that outputs resembling specific characters were an incidental consequence of that learning rather than reproduction. The case joined a growing docket of suits testing that argument against image generators specifically, distinct from the parallel wave of litigation over text-based large language models and news or book content, and added a third major studio’s resources to the effort to establish a precedent against AI image generation of copyrighted characters.