The AI Copyright Wave Hits Midjourney — And It’s Not Just Artists Anymore
No furniture designer lawsuit against Midjourney exists in court records — but the AI copyright cases that do exist will decide the same questions.
The working title promised a bombshell: 12 furniture designers, a federal lawsuit, Midjourney in the dock. Except that case doesn’t exist — not in PACER, not in any credible legal database, not anywhere a court reporter has been. So instead of covering a lawsuit that isn’t there, here’s what’s actually happening in AI copyright law, because the real story is messy enough without inventing details.
Since 2023, a cluster of copyright cases against AI image generators has been working its way through U.S. federal courts, and the outcomes will set the rules for every creative industry — including furniture design, industrial design, and anyone else whose livelihood depends on visual intellectual property being treated as, well, property.
The Cases That Actually Exist
The anchor case is Andersen v. Midjourney, Inc., filed in November 2023 in the Northern District of California. Artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz sued Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt, claiming their copyrighted illustrations were scraped and used in training data without consent or compensation. The suit seeks class action status, which would pull in potentially thousands of artists.
Andersen put it plainly at the time of filing:
“They’re using our creative work without permission and without compensation.”
Midjourney’s counter has been equally direct — the company argues that training on publicly available images qualifies as fair use, a transformative purpose that copyright law has historically protected.
Running parallel is Getty Images v. Stability AI, filed in January 2023. Getty’s argument is harder to dismiss on fair use grounds because Stability AI’s outputs have reportedly reproduced Getty’s watermark — which is a pretty bold thing for an “transformative” system to do. That case is proceeding in the Northern District of Illinois.
Why Furniture Designers Should Be Watching
The furniture and industrial design world has a specific problem that illustrators share but with an added layer of complexity: U.S. copyright law protects the artistic elements of functional objects, but not the functional elements themselves. A chair’s silhouette, surface ornamentation, and distinctive joinery can qualify for protection — but only if those elements are separable from the chair’s function as a thing you sit on. Courts call this the “separability test,” and it’s notoriously hard to apply.
If Midjourney V7 generates a chair that reproduces the distinctive proportions or joinery of a protected original, a designer would need to prove both that the training data included their work and that the output crosses from inspiration into reproduction. That’s a two-step legal burden that doesn’t get easier with time. What the Andersen case could establish — or fail to establish — is whether the first step (scraping for training) is itself the infringement, regardless of what the model ultimately produces.
The Fair Use Question Nobody Can Answer Yet
Here’s the honest state of play: copyright law wasn’t written with large-scale machine learning in mind. The four-factor fair use test — purpose, nature of the work, amount used, market effect — was designed for humans using existing work to create new work. Whether feeding millions of images into a neural network constitutes “use” in the copyright sense, and whether the resulting model “contains” those images in any legally meaningful way, are genuinely open questions.
Legal scholars have been clear that current doctrine doesn’t map cleanly onto AI training. Courts will have to decide whether training is transformative (Midjourney’s position), whether it creates a market substitute for the original (artists’ position), or whether it’s something else entirely that requires new statutory language from Congress. All three outcomes are live possibilities.
What’s Next
The Andersen case is the one to watch. A ruling in favor of the plaintiff class would send a shockwave through every AI company using scraped web data — which is most of them. A ruling for Midjourney would effectively greenlight the current approach and push the fight to Congress. Either way, the furniture design industry, the fashion industry, and every other creative sector currently watching from the sidelines will get their answer from someone else’s lawsuit first. That’s either reassuring or infuriating, depending on how much stock you’ve put into a distinctive chair design lately.
