New Delhi, June 17 -- On 11 June 2025, Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, claiming that the AI image-generation platform was creating "recognisable" images of characters over which they held exclusive rights. This is the latest in a series of complaints lodged against AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, alleging that this revolutionary new technology conflicts with the way intellectual property law has operated for centuries.

At the heart of all these cases lies the prohibition under copyright law against the reproduction of literary and artistic works without the owner's permission. AI companies admittedly 'train' their models on text, audio and video material scraped from the internet. Given that much of the o...