Disney Hits Google With Cease & Desist Claiming AI Copyright On A Massive Scale

This past week Disney inked a $1 billion deal with OpenAI to become a content licensing partner for the Sora AI video generation platform, then immediately went on the legal offensive against Google. As with prior cease and desists sent to Meta, Character.AI, NBC, Warner Bros., and others, Disney's cease and desist relates to AI tools being able to recreate Disney-owned characters. On December 11th, Disney insisted that Google "immediately cease further copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney's copyrighted characters" and "immediately implement effective technological measures within Google's AI services [...] to ensure that no future outputs infringe Disney works".

The next day, Variety detailed Google's response. This included removing the AI videos (some generated with Google Veo 3) flagged by Disney in its original cease and desist letter, stating that "we have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them. More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which gives sites and copyright holders control over their content."

All told, it would seem that a larger lawsuit between Disney and Google is on pause, for now. It's a given that major copyright holders like Disney will defend their properties, but few anticipated that Disney would partner with OpenAI. As copyright enforcement becomes more and more difficult to navigate in the generative AI era, it would seem Disney's current strategy is to partner with an AI platform it favors and enforce its copyrights against the others.

While this does bring some form of accountability to gen-AI platforms, it's hard to say it benefits anybody besides OpenAI and Disney. In fact, Square Enix, the Japanese developers of the Kingdom Hearts series co-owned by Disney, and other other anime and game studios sent a letter to OpenAI, demanding their work not be used to train the company's models. This was in spite of an opt-out policy for Sora AI video generation, which the Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA) claimed still allowed Sora to train on partnered works without permission.