Midjourney is asking Hollywood studios to hand over their internal AI files in court, turning a copyright infringement case into an awkward question: are the studios doing privately what they’re suing the startup for doing publicly?
The dispute has its roots in a 110-page complaint filed on 11 June 2025, when Disney, Universal, and DreamWorks Animation sued Midjourney in the Central District of California, alleging mass copyright infringement involving characters from Star Wars, Marvel, The Simpsons, Pixar, Shrek, and Minions. CNBC reported that the suit demands a jury trial, arguing Midjourney’s conduct threatens to ‘upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law.’ Warner Bros. followed on 5 September 2025 with its own filing, adding franchises including Batman, Superman, The Powerpuff Girls, and Scooby-Doo to the mix, according to the Copyright Alliance.
Midjourney’s defence rests on fair use: it argues that training AI models on images of copyrighted characters is legally permitted. Now, in the discovery phase, it wants to make that argument uncomfortable for the studios.
What Midjourney Wants from Hollywood Studios’ AI Files
The startup’s latest filing seeks a broad set of internal materials: AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, documents on how AI is used in film and TV production, and board presentations discussing AI strategy. According to VP Land, Midjourney’s counsel Ghajar framed the rationale bluntly: ‘If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses.’
The startup goes further, arguing that if the studios are building image-generating AI tools for internal storyboarding or creative development, that would ‘demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.’ It also wants the studios to disclose every prompt they ran through Midjourney, not just the ones that produced allegedly infringing outputs.
The Case That Could Rewrite AI Discovery Rules
The battle over what gets disclosed is now running through the courts on two tracks. Magistrate Judge Joel Richlin issued an order limiting Midjourney’s discovery to AI use that led to ‘consumer-facing’ videos and images. Variety places that ruling on 15 June; letsdatascience.com gives the date as 16 June. The sources conflict on the precise date. What is not in dispute is what Midjourney did next: its lawyers filed a motion urging District Judge John Kronstadt to overturn the order, arguing the current limit ‘unfairly’ allows the studios to ‘cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.’
The studios’ lead attorney David Singer called the broad request a ‘fishing expedition.’ He added that the studios ‘do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business,’ but ‘simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] famous characters without authorization.’
There is more riding on Judge Kronstadt’s decision than this one case. As Engadget reported, citing litigation publication Mealey’s, a federal ruling on the scope of discovery here could set a precedent for what kinds of internal AI documents can be compelled in copyright disputes across the industry. The studios have built their case around market harm: Midjourney’s tool, they argue, creates a substitute for their own licensed characters. Midjourney’s counter is that if the studios are quietly training models on unlicensed material themselves, the ‘harm’ argument looks a lot thinner.
That is the logic behind the document requests. It is also why Variety described Midjourney’s move as an attempt to reframe the entire lawsuit, shifting attention from what the startup generates to what the studios do internally when they think no one is watching.
Judge Kronstadt’s ruling on the discovery scope will determine whether that gambit gets any traction, or whether the studios can keep their AI strategies behind closed doors while pressing their copyright claims in open court.
