Here’s the thing about throwing stones: it helps if you’re not living in a glass house. That’s essentially the argument Midjourney is making as it tries to force Hollywood’s biggest studios to hand over their own AI training records in an ongoing copyright battle.
The AI image generation company filed a motion on July 3, 2026, seeking expanded discovery that would give it access to internal AI business plans, research reports, datasets, and even model weights belonging to Disney, NBCUniversal, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The logic is straightforward: if these studios are also training AI models on unlicensed copyrighted content, their moral authority to sue Midjourney for doing the same thing gets considerably weaker.
The backstory: how we got here
The lawsuit saga kicked off in June 2025, when Disney and Universal/DreamWorks filed suits accusing Midjourney of using their copyrighted characters without permission to train its generative AI models. Warner Bros. Discovery piled on in September 2025. The allegations center on direct and secondary copyright infringement, the kind of claims that could reshape how the entire AI industry handles training data.
Midjourney isn’t denying the core mechanics of how its models work. Instead, it’s building a defense on two pillars: fair use and a doctrine called “unclean hands.” The unclean hands argument essentially says: you can’t sue me for something you’re doing yourself.
