Disney, WB, Universal Fire Back Against Chinese AI Firm MiniMax’s Bid to Dismiss Copyright Suit Over Hailuo AI

Disney Enterprises, Marvel Characters, Lucasfilm, Universal City Studios Productions, Warner Bros. Entertainment, DreamWorks Animation, and other major studios are urging the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to deny a motion to dismiss filed by Chinese AI company MiniMax (Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co.) and its co-defendant Nanonoble. According to Bloomberg Law, the studios filed their opposition brief after MiniMax and Nanonoble submitted their motion to dismiss on April 10, 2026, in the copyright infringement case (Case No. 2:25-cv-08768) originally filed September 16, 2025. The case is assigned to Judge Stanley Blumenfeld Jr., with a hearing on the dismissal motion scheduled for May 29, 2026.

The studios’ complaint centers on MiniMax’s Hailuo AI service, an AI-powered video and image generation platform that MiniMax itself marketed as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket.” The complaint alleges that Hailuo AI generates high-quality, downloadable images and videos of copyrighted characters upon user request—including Darth Vader (Star Wars/Lucasfilm), Spider-Man (Marvel), and Shrek (DreamWorks)—and that this constitutes both direct and secondary copyright infringement (contributory and induced). The studios characterize the infringement as “willful and brazen,” pointing to MiniMax’s marketing language as evidence of deliberate intent to capitalize on their intellectual property.

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MiniMax and Nanonoble’s motion to dismiss raises four primary arguments. First, personal jurisdiction: the defendants argue that as Chinese entities, they lack sufficient minimum contacts with the United States for the Central District of California to exercise jurisdiction over them. Second, copyright registration specificity: defendants contend that a copyright registration covering a film or book does not automatically protect every character depicted therein, and that the studios have failed to identify specific copyright registrations covering the characters themselves—as opposed to the registered works in which they appear. Third, extraterritorial direct infringement: any copying involved in training the AI model occurred in China, not the United States, placing it outside the reach of U.S. copyright law. Fourth, secondary liability: the studios failed to plausibly allege that MiniMax had the requisite knowledge or financial benefit, or that Hailuo AI was substantially designed to facilitate infringement, to sustain claims of contributory or induced infringement. Defense counsel characterized the studios’ copyright arguments as “entirely artificial” in the context of litigation about artificial intelligence—a pointed rhetorical irony that signals the adversarial tone of the proceedings.

The studios’ opposition brief argues that personal jurisdiction is well-established because MiniMax actively targeted U.S. users through app store distribution and advertising campaigns directed at the American market. On copyright registration, the plaintiffs assert that infringement of characters appearing in registered copyrighted works falls squarely within the scope of those registrations, and that no separate character-level registration is required to maintain infringement claims. On the extraterritoriality point, the studios argue that the infringing outputs—not just the training process—constitute the relevant infringing act, and that outputs accessible to U.S. users implicate U.S. copyright law regardless of where model training occurred.

The case sits at the intersection of several unsettled legal questions in AI copyright law. The first concerns secondary liability standards for AI output platforms. When a user requests an AI service to generate content depicting a copyrighted character and the service complies, the legal question of whether the platform provider bears contributory or induced liability requires courts to apply the Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984) staple article of commerce doctrine and the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster (2005) inducement standard to a fundamentally new technological context. The second concerns character copyright protection scope. The degree to which a copyright registration for a motion picture or literary work extends to protect all appearances of a character in generative AI contexts—as opposed to traditional media—has not been fully adjudicated. The third concerns personal jurisdiction over foreign AI companies. A ruling upholding jurisdiction over MiniMax would effectively establish that Chinese AI companies offering services accessible to U.S. users can be sued in U.S. federal courts under U.S. copyright law, regardless of where their servers and training data are located.

The MiniMax case is part of a broader wave of generative AI copyright litigation involving OpenAI, Stability AI, Midjourney, Meta, and others in U.S. federal courts. What distinguishes the MiniMax case is its cross-border dimension: while most prior AI copyright suits involve U.S.-based defendants, MiniMax is a Chinese company with its primary operations and AI training infrastructure in China. A decision on the merits would therefore have implications not just for the U.S. domestic AI industry but for how global AI service providers assess their legal exposure under U.S. copyright law.

The May 29, 2026 hearing before Judge Blumenfeld is likely to produce a ruling on the jurisdictional and threshold copyright questions. If the court denies the motion to dismiss, the case will proceed to discovery—a phase that could require MiniMax to disclose significant technical details about Hailuo AI’s training data, model architecture, and the specific works used during training. A ruling on the copyright registration specificity issue, in particular, could clarify whether character owners must separately register fictional characters to maintain copyright infringement claims against generative AI services—a question with wide implications for studios, publishers, and gaming companies whose portfolios center on franchise characters.