Midjourney to hand Disney its video training datasets under discovery stipulation in copyright suit

What happened

Under a stipulation and order published Oct. 7, 2026 in Disney v. Midjourney, Midjourney will turn over to Disney's lawyers the video datasets used to train its models, so Disney's experts can quantify alleged copying from the company's own files rather than outside estimates. Midjourney's answer in the case leans on fair use, and the company is already producing sampled outputs in the same case: 385 jobs per character, with experts allowed to extrapolate counts to the full population.

Why it may matter to you

The handover converts the case's damages theory into a data point: if Disney's experts produce a number from the transferred datasets, the unlicensed-training discount gets its first image-side datapoint, against comparables like Warner Music's Suno settlement and the $9 billion statutory ceiling cited in the second Suno suit. Midjourney is bootstrapped, so any bill lands on its income statement rather than a war chest.

What is not yet known

What Disney's experts will claim the datasets show; no source yet carries a damages figure from the filing.