Midjourney is a product that is being sold for money. Midjourney is making money off of providing users with unauthorized images of Disney and Universal characters. Midjourney is not making up original characters that happen to look like the licensed characters; they are just producing the characters themselves:

For example, if a Midjourney subscriber prompts the AI tool to generate an image of Darth Vader, it immediately obliges, according to the plaintiffs, and the same occurs for images of Minions.

Furthermore, we know that Midjourney obtained the ability to generate these images by training on Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted properties. This is why Midjourney knows these characters by name.

To your example, I think one big difference is that if you make a digital drawing of Mickey Mouse and then print it out, you are not going on to share that image with a global marketplace of other Epson users. Additionally, you also need an uncommon level of drawing skill to produce a drawing that is so convincing that people may confuse it for Disney’s own work. Midjourney has a social page where users share their creations, and those pages are littered with people’s low-effort generations of licensed characters:

Image

With Midjourney, any doofus can generate an image of Mickey Mouse flipping off Goofy, and it will look good enough that most people will think Disney made it. If the internet is littered with images like this, it reduces the value of Disney’s properties.