Both Disney and Paramount-Skydance have sent cease and desist letters to China’s ByteDance accusing them of “blatant infringement” of intellectual property rights after the recent spate of hyper-realistic Seedance 2.0 AI videos were released last week.
Paramount’s letter, signed by Paramount Skydance’s head of intellectual property Gabriel Miller, demands that ByteDance immediately cease the infringement, Variety reported.
Miller added that “much of the content that the Seed Platforms produce contains vivid depictions of Paramount’s famous and iconic franchises and characters, which are protected under copyright law, trademark law, and the law of unfair competition (among other doctrines).”
She noted that Seedance also illegitimately uses properties including, South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer and Avatar: The Last Airbender, which she says have “all been repeatedly infringed by the Seed Platforms’ production and subsequent public performance and distribution of these images and videos.”
For its part, Disney has sent a letter of its own blasting ByteDance for misusing “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”
The Motion Picture Association also condemned the Chinese company over the video saying that Seedance 2.0 is violating copyright and trademark laws and opening the door for widespread theft of intellectual property, Variety reported.
“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,” an MPA spokesperson said in a statement, Variety reported. “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. ByteDance should immediately cease its infringing activity.”
The legal warnings, often a precursor to wider legal actions, come on the heels of a series of videos released depicting famed movie characters in computer-generated scenes created entirely with artificial intelligence and without the participation or approval of the actors. One such clip, a short scene of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting on a rooftop, went viral last week.
The video clip sent many in Hollywood into despair that their livelihoods are on the verge of becoming extinct as AI gets stronger and more capable every day.
Rhett Reese, who is a writer on the Marvel super hero Deadpool franchise, is one who expressed shock over the videos. He took to X and wrote “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.”
“In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases,” Reese added on another X post.
The videos also made use of famed action characters such as Godzilla and Marvel’s Spider-Man.
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