A discreet fintech entrepreneur is betting that Hollywood’s copyright fight over artificial intelligence will need more than lawsuits to be won. Speaking to Page Six Hollywood through a blacked-out Zoom screen, the man identified only as Alex said he has personally spent more than $100,000 building a covert venture designed to expose how image and video generators can reproduce protected characters and styles without permission.

Alex’s pitch comes as major studios step up their legal offensive. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025, accusing the company of using and distributing AI-generated versions of their best-known characters without authorisation, and later Warner Bros. Discovery joined a similar case. CNBC reported that the Disney-Universal filing described the dispute as a test of the foundations of US copyright law, while the Los Angeles Times said the studios sought to stop what they called the routine copying of characters from franchises including Star Wars, Marvel and Despicable Me.

The entrepreneur said the idea crystallised after users began pushing ChatGPT’s image tools to imitate the look of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio co-founded by Hayao Miyazaki. From there, he launched a policing service called LightBar in January, which he described as a kind of trial run for the larger company behind it, VN.ai. The platform pays people to probe AI models and document examples of infringement, while the longer-term business would offer subscription monitoring and custom investigations for rights holders.

One demonstration he described involved Midjourney, which is now facing litigation from Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery. According to Alex, a user uploaded a reference image from the original Star Wars films that contained no characters, then prompted the system to create “a small green creature wearing a robe”. He said the output resembled Yoda, and further prompts could push the model towards Grogu or other familiar figures without using those names. He said he has shown the findings to studios involved in the case.

The legal question remains unsettled. Midjourney and other AI companies have argued that training on publicly available material qualifies as transformative fair use, while MiniMax, another defendant in Hollywood’s broader AI fight, has said its liability should rest with users and that US courts may not have jurisdiction. Kim Meyer, a lawyer who has represented Scarlett Johansson, told Page Six Hollywood that courts so far seem broadly receptive to the AI firms’ fair-use arguments, but that copyright law itself may need a major overhaul to handle generative technology. For Alex, that uncertainty is exactly why enforcement tools matter: even if studios prevail, he argues, they will still need a way to detect and block infringement at scale.

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Source: Noah Wire Services