On June 11, Disney and Universal teamed up to serve a lawsuit against Midjourney, one of the most popular generative AI image creating platforms in the country. And if you care about the future of copyright law in the United States, this is the lawsuit to pay attention to.

In its 110-page filing Disney and Universal show how easy it is to almost perfectly recreate movie-image stills of everything from Darth Vader, Elsa, Deadpool, Po, and Shrek. The clear indication is that Midjourney brazenly trained their models on all of this copyrighted material and then opened the door for any user to share in the infringement.

What makes this lawsuit so important for our media industries is that Disney and Universal are intentionally going after a relatively small fish in the AI industry (Midjourney’s revenue from 2024 was around $300 million). Unlike Google or OpenAI, Midjourney potentially doesn’t have the resources to fight back against one of the most notoriously litigious and deep-pocketed media companies in the world (Disney).

A loss in court would set a clear legal precedent that would ripple out across AI. Midjourney would essentially be out of business and all AI companies would have to seek out ways to completely retrain their models to avoid copyright infringement, put in place cumbersome methods of restricting the generation of infringing material, or set out to retroactively license all the material they fed into their LLMs. A loss could completely alter the future path of AI (as well as how IP holders are and will be compensated for their work).

If there is no path for Midjourney to win or settle with Disney and Universal, publishing will be in a position to benefit from the fight the mouse picked and leverage would shift away from tech to our media industries.

The wild card, of course, is what the current administration chooses to do. And we’ve already gotten a hint: Trump’s firing of the head of the Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter. If the government thinks this lawsuit throws up a significant obstacle in the country’s arms race with China toward artificial super intelligence (ASI), they’ll seek to kneecap copyright law.

I believe this is the most important lawsuit to watch in 2025. The outcome will determine whether or not copyright law still exists in the years and decades to come.