Warner Bros. sues Midjourney
After Disney and NBCUniversal, it is now Warner Bros. Entertainment’s turn to sue Midjourney. On 4 September 2025, the studio filed a complaint before a court in Los Angeles (Case No. 25-8376), accusing the start-up of enabling the generation of images reproducing its iconic characters, including those of DC Comics (Batman, Superman, the Joker, etc.).
Warner is seeking up to $150,000 per infringement, together with an injunction to stop the uses it considers unlawful.
Midjourney is expected to repeat the defence it raised against Disney: under its terms of service, the company prohibits any copyright infringement but cannot detect it without notice from the rights holder.
The artificial intelligence start-up could also rely on the fair use doctrine (Section 107 of the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 107), accepted for the first time in the context of generative AI on 23 June by a Californian judge in the Anthropic case. The judge held that training an AI on protected works was akin to “a reader aspiring to be a writer”, and therefore amounted to fair use (Case No. 24-05417 WHA).
Midjourney might, however, choose to settle the dispute amicably, as Anthropic did. Despite an initial favourable ruling, Anthropic entered into a now-public settlement on 5 September bringing the litigation to an end. Under its terms, Anthropic undertakes to pay $1.5 billion into a compensation fund for authors whose works were used without authorisation to train its models.
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