Amid a growing storm of concerns over AI video, Disney has fired a cease-and-desist letter against China’s ByteDance, accusing its new SeaDance 2.0 platform of treating Disney IP from Star Wars to Marvel to Family Guy as if it were “free public domain clip art” and stocking a “pirated library of Disney copyrighted characters.”
Axios first reported the letter from Disney. The letter follows backlash from the Motion Picture Association of Seadance 2.0 and earlier today from the Human Artistry Campaign, of which SAG-AFTRA and DGA are members.
“ByteDance’s de facto usurpation of Disney’s intellectual property is intentional, pervasive, and completely unacceptable,” lawyers for the entertainment giant wrote.
The Human Artistry campaign, called Seedance 2.0, launched by TikTok’s parent company this week is “an attack on every creator in the world. Stealing the work of human creators to replace it with AI-generated slop is destructive to our culture. Stealing is not innovation.”
Seadance sparked outrage in record time after a series of highly authentic-looking deepfakes based on copyrighted Hollywood film and TV IP went viral, including a fight scene between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, and an alternate ending to the series. stranger things And so on.
The MPA on Wednesday called on ByteDance to “immediately cease its infringing activities.”
“In just one day, Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has committed massive misappropriation of U.S. copyrighted material. By launching its service without meaningful protections against copyright infringement, ByteDance is ignoring established copyright laws that protect the rights of creators and support millions of U.S. jobs,” the studio trade group said.
Disney sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to Google in December, and as Deadline recently reported, the company’s tools, including Gemini and Nano Banana, have now started rejecting prompts that include Disney-owned characters.
Separately, Disney signed a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to license characters to its generative video app Sora, seeking a piece of the growing market.
