Midjourney Motion Would Force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to Disclose Their Own Internal AI Use in Copyright Fight

Midjourney's lawyers filed a motion this week asking Judge John Kronstadt of the U.S. District Court to overturn a June 15 magistrate ruling that limited discovery to studios' 'consumer-facing' AI uses. Midjourney wants Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. Discovery to hand over AI business plans, research reports, training datasets, model weights, and board presentations, arguing that if the studios themselves train image models on unlicensed copyrighted material for storyboarding and internal ideation, it would establish that unlicensed training is 'industry custom' — an unclean-hands defense to the studios' 2025 infringement suit.