I would seriously suggest you contact a lawyer, because your understanding of copyright law isn’t the best. But let me explain it to you again:
First, the ruling of Thaler has no influence on the Copyright Act, the quoted paragraph (Works That Lack Human Authorship) existed long before the court case involving Thaler.
Next, again, it doesn’t matter what terms you agreed on with Midjourney, national law always overrules any individual terms. Otherwise a company could sell you stolen content and you would legally own it, just because their terms say so.
The current national copyright law of the US (also the EU and many other nations) is very clear that copyrights can only be granted if there is a human involved. The part that you seemingly ignore:
To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being.
Merely entering text prompts does not make you the creator of the work any more than a customer of an artist becomes the creator of an artwork if he gives directions to the artist.
This is even more clear as Midjourney gives you random results every time you enter a text prompt, even if you use a seed. Merely picking a random result generated by the AI does not equal authorship.
The only way you can claim actual authorship over AI art is if you make substantial modifications to it, e.g. by painting over it, erasing parts, mixing it with other images. But in that case it is not the AI art anymore but a creation of your own labor.
I also find it funny that you hang on to Midjourneys terms this much, even though these make it clear that anyone else can freely use your generated images:
Please note: Midjourney is an open community which allows others to use and remix your images and prompts whenever they are posted in a public setting.
One could also argue that the Unreal marketplace constitutes a public setting and therefore anyone can “use and remix your images” as per the Midjourney terms.
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But if you believe otherwise, good luck suing someone who uses “your” AI generated works without paying you.
Maybe you win and you set a new precedent for US law (which would still not change EU law though) - but until then don’t claim AI art can be copyright, when even large companies like Getty and Shutterstock with their own legal departments think otherwise:
On Wednesday, Getty Images changed course, saying it has banned the upload and sale of AI-generated images due to copyright concerns.
“There are real concerns with respect to the copyright of outputs from these models and unaddressed rights issues with respect to the imagery, the image metadata and those individuals contained within the imagery,” Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told the Verge.
Which also points to the legal hell you actually enter by using Midjourney, which uses copyrighted works for it’s generation - without permission; As VertexMachine said earlier, Midjourney sometimes generates images with (illegible) watermarks and signatures.
I expect Epic will eventually follow Getty and ban AI generated images from the marketplace.