Hollywood’s top studios aren’t happy with ByteDance’s February 16 pledge to curb unauthorized use of intellectual property at Seedance 2.0, as evidenced by a new letter from the Motion Picture Association of America. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) sent a strongly worded cease-and-desist letter to the Chinese technology giant on Friday, accusing the tools it developed of systemic infringement, The Hollywood Reporter confirmed.
This is the first time the MPA has issued a cease-and-desist letter to a large generative artificial intelligence company.
The letter, in the form of a collective industry response in response to Seedance 2.0, points out that the unauthorized use of intellectual property in Seedance 2.0 videos was not an accidental mistake, but an inherent flaw in the technology itself.
"The scale and consistency of these results indicate that this is systemic infringement, not negligence. In other words, Seedance's copyright infringement is a feature of its technology, not a vulnerability," the letter reads. Variety magazine previously reported on the letter.
Warner Bros. issued a cease-and-desist letter claiming that the owner of TikTok "knowingly designed" to plagiarize its intellectual property.
The letter arrived about a week after the MPA CEO first raised objections to Seedance 2.0 user-generated videos.
The videos feature Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and characters from Spider-Man, Transformers, Stranger Things and other iconic Hollywood properties.
Charles Rifkin claimed that the AI-generated tool "made massive unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works."
Since then, Netflix, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount and Sony have also issued legal threats to ByteDance.
Warner Bros. said in its cease-and-desist letter that the Chinese technology company is following its usual tactic with generative AI tools: first infringing on copyright for marketing purposes, and then only erecting roadblocks when legal threats follow.
On Monday, amid the furor, ByteDance told the BBC that the company "respects intellectual property rights" and is "taking steps to strengthen existing protections to prevent users from unauthorized use of intellectual property and portrait rights."
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) said in its latest statement that this is not enough.
"The damage to MPA member studios is substantial and ongoing. While we note ByteDance's recent statements to the media... we need more than these general statements at this time," the group wrote. "We are conducting ongoing investigations and reviews of social media platforms and continue to find content produced by ByteDance that clearly violates the rights of our members."
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPA) also pointed out that intellectual property infringement is not a problem caused by users, but the result of Bytedance’s own actions.
The letter read: "ByteDance used its works to train models without the consent of MPA member studios (which is a necessary first step in producing infringing works), and released services without setting any restrictions; in addition, ByteDance also copied and disseminated content that blatantly infringed the copyrights of MPA member studios through its own actions."
Seedance 2.0 created a buzz almost immediately after it went live on February 12th.
An AI-generated video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting has gone viral, prompting social media users including "Deadpool" and "The Wolverine" screenwriter Rhett Reese to predict the end of Hollywood. “I really hate to say it,” he wrote on social platform