Dale Nelson Weighs in on Disney and NBCUniversal’s Lawsuit Against Midjourney in IndieWire
Dale Nelson recently spoke to IndieWire about Disney and NBCUniversal’s first-of-its-kind lawsuit against AI firm Midjourney, which has the potential to set a precedent for how AI firms can train and commercialize their models.
At the forefront of the claims, Disney and NBCUniversal allege that they asked Midjourney to restrict users from generating copyrighted characters and images on their platform, and that the AI firm has remained unresponsive and continues to allow for direct digital replicas and derivatives of their intellectual property.
“Legally speaking, it’s clear that Midjourney is willfully infringing. They’re intentionally infringing, and it sounds like they didn’t take any steps to try to mitigate or limit what the users could do on their platform,” she tells IndieWire. “And willful infringement is far worse than infringement of the type where you have a good faith belief that what you were doing was okay. So the fact that they didn’t respond to the studios’ letters just doesn’t look good for Midjourney.”
Dale adds that Midjourney could argue that a ruling against them would adversely affect the entire AI industry at large, but that is unlikely given the nature of Disney and NBCUniversal’s claims.
“I think that they have made very specific factual allegations in their complaint, probably wisely so, so that it’s not a lawsuit just about all AI. This is a very specific use that they’re complaining about,” she concludes.