Posted in: Comics, Movies, TV | Tagged: disney, google, OpenAI

Google Removing AI Videos with Disney Characters Following C&D Letter

Following a cease-and-desist letter on Thursday, Google announced that it had begun removing AI-generated videos that include characters that Disney owns.

On Thursday, The Walt Disney Company made two significant moves regarding generative artificial intelligence (AI). First, CEO Bob ("AIger") Iger announced a three-year, $1 billion deal with OpenAI that's going to see a whole lot of "The Mouse's" IPs making their way over to OpenAI's Sora. Second, Disney's legal folks sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google demanding that Google take immediate action to safeguard Disney's licensing rights to its IPs (more on that below). Well, it seems Google has responded by removing dozens of AI-generated videos that include Disney-owned characters – including Mickey Mouse, Deadpool, and others. Interested viewers will now be directed to the following message after hitting the flagged links: "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Disney."

"We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them," Google shared in a statement on Thursday, in response to Disney's cease-and-desist letter. "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 give sites and copyright holders control over their content."

Disney's Cease-and-Desist Letter & Google: An Overview

On Thursday, "The Mouse's" legal team made it clear in their letter to Google that it sees Google's training setups and services as an infringement on Disney's IP rights. "Google is intentionally amplifying the scope of its infringement, by making its infringing AI Services available across so many channels to so many consumers, flooding the market with infringing works, and reaping enormous profits and other value from its unlawful, harmful, and damaging exploitation of Disney's copyrighted works."

Also in the letter, "The Mouse" noted that there were efforts made to work with Google, but nothing had resulted from it, and that the use of its copyrighted works "has only increased" over that time period. "Google operates as a virtual vending machine, capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on a mass scale. And compounding Google's blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI Services are branded with Google's Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google's exploitation of Disney's intellectual property is authorized and endorsed by Disney." To that last point, "The Mouse" contended that Google Gemini treats "Disney's valuable copyrighted characters like its own, and making them available to subscribers for a fee."

For its part, "The Mouse" sought to have Google cease any further violations of its copyright licenses and implement a system that blocks its IPs from being used in the future. In addition, Disney is seeking Google's disclosure of which copyrighted works were utilized during the training of AI models and to cease using them immediately. Google's "willful infringement is especially alarming because it is leveraging its dominance in generative AI and across multiple other markets to make its infringing AI Services as widely available as possible," added the letter from Disney.

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