When a company releases a new AI model, it’s become customary for it to make a splash by pissing off an intellectual property owner or some other entity speaking up on behalf of copyrights, preferably spurring some form of legal action or warning.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been the target of lawsuits galore—most famously from the New York Times. Stability was sued, largely unsuccessfully by a consortium of image copyright holders in the UK. OpenAI received a note from Japan when Sora 2 was released, asking it to refrain from what it considers the infringement of anime and manga copyrights. Suno and Udio were at one point targeted by music publishers over alleged copyright violations. There are countless other examples, each with its own allegations and accusations.
Now apparently it’s ByteDance’s turn. The splashiest new AI model of the past few weeks, in case you haven’t heard, is ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, which is sort of like Sora 2, except the slop videos it makes are a little less embarrassing to watch.
Seedance 2.0 appears to be pretty versatile, but viral early prompts suggest that users especially like it for its fake ads, frequently starring someone who appears to have the face of Bob Odenkirk for some reason, and for what appear to be little 15-second John Wick movies, except the prompter can insert seemingly anyone they want in place of John Wick, such as (apparently) Harry Potter, or Thanos, or RoboCop.
As a non-expert and non-lawyer myself, this is just what very much appears to be the case, and I’m not claiming with certainty that anyone is infringing on anything.
But with that in mind, I’d like to extend my congratulations to TikTok’s original parent company ByteDance on the occasion of its viral AI model! The prize for this accomplishment is a high-profile cease-and-desist letter, in this case from Disney.
The letter, which was viewed by Axios and reported on Friday afternoon, says Seedance 2.0 comes “with 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.” Characters named in the letter include Baby Yoda, Peter Griffin, Spider-Man, and Darth Vader.
The letter on behalf of Disney, attributed to an outside lawyer named David Singer, claims “ByteDance is hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters. ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable.”
Disney, of course, entered into a content partnership about two months ago with OpenAI, not ByteDance, meaning Disney IP is not free public domain clip art, but highly prized and exclusive clip art. Under the terms of the agreement, OpenAI has explained that Sora will be able to be used “to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing from a set of more than 200 animated, masked and creature characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.”
At the moment, judging from my own tests, this partnership has not yet been integrated into the Sora product, because Disney characters appeared to be blocked by the app. OpenAI’s page about the Disney deal says Disney implementation should be expected in early 2026.
Disney is far from alone in making a deal like this. Last year, Universal Music Group, for instance, settled a lawsuit against the AI music generator Udio, and created a music-generation partnership in the process. A few weeks later Warner Music Group did the same thing.
But the message that can be gleaned from these cease-and-desists and lawsuits in the context of eventual deals with AI companies appears to be that companies do not so much disapprove of AI being used at will by random internet users to generate content involving their precious intellectual property without concern for artistic merit. It would seem from their actions that the AI should be used at will by random internet users to generate content involving its precious intellectual property without concern for artistic merit only as long as the copyright holders can get their beaks wet.
It’s not clear how legally compatible the OpenAI-Disney deal would be with any hypothetical future partnership between Disney and ByteDance, but if contract law prevents such a thing, maybe ByteDance will have to settle for an agreement that makes Seedance 2.0 the exclusive slop video generator of Universal-affiliated intellectual property such as Minions and the Fast & Furious cinematic universe.
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