EVOX Productions LLC, an automotive photography company, has filed a lawsuit against AI image generator Midjourney, accusing it of copying tens of thousands of its copyrighted vehicle photos without permission. EVOX filed the lawsuit on Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. According to the complaint, Midjourney downloaded the images from publicly available online datasets without obtaining a license or asking for consent, and allegedly removed copyright information, such as watermarks, image credits, and metadata, before using the photos to train its AI model. EVOX claims Midjourney’s AI was built to “reproduce and mimic” the images it was trained on, and that Midjourney is profiting from a product that competes with its own licensing business. The company is asking the court to stop Midjourney’s alleged unlawful use of its photos and to require compensation. Midjourney is also being sued by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. over allegations of widespread copyright infringement. Midjourney does not deny the allegations, arguing that training AI on copyrighted material qualifies as fair use, and says that Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. all use similar generative AI tools internally.