Sony has submitted a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, despite the Chinese conglomerate publicly claiming that it respects intellectual property rights and is “taking steps” to improve. This is the fifth major Hollywood company to file a cease and desist letter in the past week, despite the Chinese giant’s public insistence that it respects intellectual property rights and is “taking steps” to improve.
ByteDance unveiled the latest version of its Seedance video generation model last week, thoroughly surprising creatives and executives alike with content that clearly plagiarizes copyrighted IP. Disney and Paramount issued legal documents warning them to desist, leading to the incident. The Motion Picture Association of America and the Human Artistry Campaign, whose members include SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America, also condemned the platform.
“We have heard your concerns regarding SeaDance 2.0,” ByteDance said in a statement to Deadline. “We are taking steps to strengthen our current safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of our intellectual property and likeness by our users.”
That’s not enough, according to subsequent cease-and-desist letters from Warner Bros., Netflix and Wednesday’s Sony Pictures Entertainment. “It is clear that this model was comprehensively trained on SPE’s copyrighted material without authorization,” the studio’s vice president and general counsel wrote to ByteDance’s general counsel.
“This model produces output that closely imitates SPE content or incorporates well-known characters or other copyrighted elements of SPE works. Seedance 2.0 produces both unauthorized reproductions and unauthorized derivative works of SPE copyrighted content. Seedance “Within days of the release of 2.0, allegedly infringing output produced by this model was widely disseminated across social media platforms,” Sony said.
“Given the egregious nature of Seedance 2.0’s output and the complete lack of visible copyright guardrails at launch, SPE has no choice but to conclude that ByteDance’s infringement was intentional.”
SPE demanded that ByteDance “cease producing and distributing output that infringes SPF’s copyrighted content” and “remove all SPE content from Seedance 2.0 or any other generative AL video output model training materials and datasets (including versions provided under license or by ByteDance to third parties).”
It further stated, “While SPE is aware of ByteDance’s recent public statements regarding delays in implementing guardrails, ByteDance’s deliberate decision to release SeedDance 2.0 without adequate guardrails speaks for itself. SPE will not tolerate delays or half-measures.”
