In brief
- Disney sent Google a cease and desist letter on Wednesday alleging widespread copyright infringement.
- The complaint arrives as Disney formalizes a character-licensing deal with OpenAI’s Sora, and invests $1 billion in the AI giant.
- Disney demanded that Google halt all AI outputs featuring its characters and add safeguards.
The fight over AI copyright infringement took an unexpected turn on Thursday as Disney hit Google with a cease and desist order, accusing the tech giant of “infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale.”
The move landed the same week that Disney reached a deal with OpenAI—announced Thursday morning—that will let the company license hundreds of its characters for use in Sora, the ChatGPT maker’s video generation model.
According to a report in Variety, attorneys for Disney sent the cease-and-desist letter to Google on Wednesday, accusing Google of copying a large library of Disney works to train its AI systems. Disney asserted that Google then distributed outputs that incorporated Disney characters through Google’s Veo, Imagen, and Nano Banana.
“Google is infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale, by copying a large corpus of Disney’s copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop generative artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models and services, and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney’s copyrights,” the letter reportedly said.
In the letter, Disney said Google’s AI models generated images featuring characters from Frozen, The Lion King, Moana, The Little Mermaid, Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Wars. It included examples, such as a depiction of Darth Vader produced through text prompts in Google’s AI apps.
Disney demanded that Google stop what it called unauthorized copying, public display, distribution, and creation of derivative works of its characters. The company also told Google to put in place measures across its AI systems to prevent future infringement.
“We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them,” a Google spokesperson told Decrypt. “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.”
Representatives for Disney did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Decrypt.
The confrontation comes as OpenAI announced a formal agreement with Disney to allow fan-made AI images of its characters. Under that deal, Sora will be able to generate short user-prompted videos featuring more than 200 characters across Disney, Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. Under the agreement, fan-made AI shorts will be streamed on Disney+. The deal also included a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI.
“This agreement shows how AI companies and creative leaders can work together responsibly to promote innovation that benefits society, respect the importance of creativity, and help works reach vast new audiences,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement.
The cease and desist letter comes at a time when companies and creators are pushing back against generative AI developers in court. In October, a federal judge ruled that authors can pursue claims against OpenAI for unlawfully downloading their books and using them to train models. This was followed in December by a ruling that said OpenAI had to turn over roughly 20 million de-identified ChatGPT logs to The New York Times.
Disney has issued similar cease and desist letters to Meta and Character.AI and is engaged in litigation—along with NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Dreamworks—against Midjourney and over alleged copyright infringement.
Editor’s note: This story was updated after publication to include a comment from Google.
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