The AI copyright lawsuit filed this week by Disney and Universal against Midjourney marks what may be the first major legal action by Hollywood studios directly targeting an AI company over copyright infringement. This lawsuit joins a wave of legal action unfolding across media and creative industries. Getty Images is pursuing Stability AI over photo training data. The New York Times is in litigation with OpenAI and Microsoft. Authors, musicians, and visual artists have all launched high-profile suits.
AI companies have now moved to ethically sourced content by paying studios for the work they created. While some early AI model builders relied on unlicensed scraping, many in the AI ecosystem, including Midjourney, OpenAI and Meta, are now partnering with rights holders and distributors to gather and prepare data for training.
In the midst of the legal battles, a new opportunity has presented itself. Studios hold the keys to an untapped goldmine — their video archives.
Studios Hold the Video Data AI Needs Most
As AI companies race to train models, they’re facing growing legal and ethical pressure around data sourcing. Scraping visual content without consent is no longer viable.
The result: AI companies are now actively searching for clean, high-quality, licensed video data to power their models.
Studios are sitting on exactly what these companies need. Decades of film, television, behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, and raw video content; rich in cultural nuance, visual diversity, and narrative structure. But these archives aren’t yet ready for AI use.
Preparing content for AI training isn’t as simple as handing over raw footage. It requires deep structuring, context-aware indexing, and searchability at scale. That’s where Versos comes in: we equip studios to transform their archives into high-value, license-ready datasets that meet the technical and ethical needs of today’s AI companies.
What Taking Control Looks Like
At Versos, we help studios move from passive rights holders to active data providers. We work with content owners to:
- Organize video archives with multimodal metadata; making every frame searchable by object, speech, context, and motion
- Structure that data in formats that are ready for training AI models without exposing the original content to misuse
- Define permissions and licensing models that let studios stay in control while monetizing use in clearly bounded ways
- Provide a chain of custody from creator to model to ensure creators are compensated and model trainers maintain verifiable proof of licensed data use
This approach will help to build a secure, structured path for content owners to participate on their own terms.
A New Revenue Stream for Studios
By making their archives searchable and leveraging the Versos AI Training Data Marketplace, studios can be primary partners in the future of AI. They can shape the terms. They can capture the value.
Get in touch to learn more about how you can join the Versos AI Data Training Marketplace and start generating a new stream of revenue, ethically and easily, from your archived footage.