Amid a rising storm of angst over AI video, Disney fired off a cease and desist letter to China’s ByteDance for stocking its new Seedance 2.0 platform “with a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters” as the platform treats Disney IP from Star Wars to Marvel to Family Guy as if it was “free public domain clip art.”
Axios was the first to report the letter from Disney, which follows Seedance 2.0 backlash from the Motion Picture Association and, earlier today, the Human Artistry Campaign, whose members include SAG-AFTRA and the DGA.
“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” wrote the entertainment giant’s counsel.
The Human Artistry Campaign called Seedance 2.0, which the parent company of TikTok launched this week, “an attack on every creator around the world. Stealing human creators’ work in an attempt to replace them with AI-generated slop is destructive to our culture: stealing isn’t innovation.”
Seedance triggered the outrage in record time after a series of highly authentic-looking deepfakes based on copyrighted Hollywood film and TV IP went viral, led by a Tom Cruise vs Brad Pitt fight scene and including alternative endings to the series Stranger Things and much more.
On Wednesday, the MPA called on ByteDance “to immediately cease its infringing activity.”
“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale. By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs,” said the studio trade group.
Disney sent a similar cease and desist letter to Google in December and, as Deadline reported recently, its tools including Gemini and Nano Banana, have now started denying prompts that contain Disney-owned characters.
Separately, seeking a piece of the growing market, Disney signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to licensing characters to the generative video app Sora.