EVOX Productions, which licenses photos of nearly every car sold in the US since 2000, has sued Midjourney in federal court in California. Its images appear on dealership sites and car marketplaces across the country.
EVOX says Midjourney took tens of thousands of its photos from public datasets without a licence and stripped the watermarks, credits and metadata before training on them.
It argues that Midjourney's subscription lets users make car images instead of licensing EVOX's, and it wants the use stopped and damages paid. It says the copying has cut the value of its archive and weakened the incentive to shoot new cars. The complaint also argues that Midjourney's model was designed to reproduce and mimic what it learned from.
Midjourney is already being sued by Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. over character images, and says its training is fair use. In that case it has also tried to make the studios disclose how they use generative AI themselves.
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