Sony has fired off a cease and desist letter to ByteDance — the fifth major Hollywood player to do so in the past week despite the giant Chinese conglomerate insisting publicly that it respects intellectual property rights and is “taking steps” to do better.
ByteDance unveiled the latest version of its Seedance video generation model last week, thoroughly spooking creatives and executives alike with content that was clearly ripped off copyrighted IP. Disney and Paramount warned it to stop with legal letters, sparking the mea culpa. The Motion Picture Association and The Human Artistry Campaign, which counts SAG-AFTRA and the Directors Guild of America among its members, also slammed the platform.
“We have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0,” ByteDance said in a statement to Deadline. “We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”
Not good enough, according to subsequent cease and desist letters from Warner Bros., Netflix and on Wednesday, Sony Pictures Entertainment. It’s “clear that this model has been comprehensively trained on SPE‘s copyrighted works without authorization,” wrote the studio’s EVP and general counsel to the ByteDance general counsel.
“The model generates outputs that closely mimic SPE content and/or incorporate well-known characters and other copyright-protected elements of SPE works. Seedance 2.0 generates both unauthorized reproductions and unauthorized derivative works of SPE’s copyrighted content. Within days of Seedance 2.0’s launch, infringing outputs reportedly generated by the model were disseminated at scale across social media platforms,” Sony said.
“Given the egregious nature of Seedance 2.0’s outputs and the complete lack of observable copyright guardrails at launch, SPE can only conclude that ByteDance’s infringements are willful.”
SPE demanded that ByteDance “cease and desist from producing and distributing outputs that infringe SPF’s copyright protected content” and “remove all SPE content from training materials and datasets for Seedance 2.0 or any other generative Al video output models, including versions thereof under license to or otherwise provided by ByteDance to third parties.”
It continued, “while SPE is aware of ByteDance’s recent public statements regarding the belated implementation of guardrails, ByteDance’s deliberate decision to release SeedDance 2.0 without appropriate guardrails is telling. SPE will not tolerate delayed or half-baked measures.”