Paramount Skydance has joined Disney as the latest Hollywood studio to slam ByteDance over its AI models SeaDance and SeedDream, claiming it is stealing intellectual property and should stop.
“We insist that ByteDance immediately take all necessary steps to (i) prevent the infringement of our intellectual property rights by ensuring that our content is no longer used or created by ByteDance or the Seed Platform, and (ii) remove all infringing Paramount content from ByteDance’s platforms and systems,” lawyers for David Ellison wrote in a cease-and-desist letter to Beijing-based ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
The letter was seen by Deadline.
“ByteDance markets the Seed Platform as an image and video generation tool that facilitates the creation and dissemination of visual and audiovisual content by users in response to searches and prompts. However, much of the content the Seed Platform generates includes vivid depictions of Paramount’s famous and iconic franchises and characters, which are protected by copyright law, trademark law, and unfair competition law (among other legal doctrines),” Parr wrote, criticizing South Park and SpongeBob SquarePants. SquarePants, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer, and Avatar: The Last Airbender are just some of the properties repeatedly infringed by the Seed platform in images and videos.
Parr also said, “It is self-evident that our intellectual property was used to train the models underlying these tools. Such training was also done without our consent and is a violation of the law. To be clear, Paramount , we strongly oppose the use of our legally protected copyrighted works in any of the ways described above (both as input trained by and as works produced by these types of models) without our express permission.”
Amid a growing wave of concerns over videos produced by the Seed platform, particularly the new Seedance 2.0, Disney Friday has sent out a cease and desist letter for intellectual property infringement of properties ranging from Star Wars to Marvel to Family Guy.
The Film Institute and the Human Artistry Campaign released a statement last week condemning ByteDance.
