Overview
- Early July filings show Midjourney has asked U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt to overturn a magistrate judge’s limit and compel broader production of studios’ internal AI records.
- Midjourney is seeking business plans, training datasets, model weights, board presentations, every prompt the studios entered into its system and all resulting outputs to support fair-use and unclean-hands defenses.
- The studios oppose the request and say the demand is overbroad and irrelevant, with lead counsel David Singer calling it a “fishing expedition” and saying they only seek to stop unauthorized copying.
- A magistrate judge on June 15, 2026 restricted discovery to consumer-facing AI uses, and Midjourney’s motion asks Kronstadt to remove that limitation so behind-the-scenes systems become discoverable.
- The outcome could set precedent for whether plaintiffs in AI copyright suits must disclose their own internal AI work, and the case carries high stakes because Warner has sought statutory damages of $150,000 per alleged infringement while Midjourney faces separate 2023 class-action claims about training on scraped images.