Overview
- In early July, Midjourney asked U.S. District Judge John Kronstadt to overturn a magistrate’s limit and force Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery to hand over internal AI materials.
- A magistrate ruled on June 15 that the studios must disclose only consumer‑facing AI uses, blocking broader discovery into internal research, datasets and model development.
- Midjourney’s filing seeks business plans, training datasets, model weights, research reports, board presentations and internal prompts to show whether studios train models on unlicensed copyrighted work.
- The studios have opposed the expanded requests as overbroad and a “fishing expedition,” saying they only want Midjourney to stop producing images that copy their characters.
- How Judge Kronstadt rules could shape legal tests for fair use, the relevance of defendants’ evidence about plaintiffs’ own AI practices, and industry norms on training data and disclosure.