Paramount Skydance accused ByteDance of engaging in “blatant infringement” of its intellectual property with its Seedance video and Seedream image generative AI platforms, alleging the Chinese internet giant is illegally ripping off IP including “South Park,” “Star Trek,” “The Godfather,” “Dora the Explorer” and more.
The media company sent a cease-and-desist letter Saturday to ByteDance, a copy of which was obtained by Variety, demanding it discontinue the alleged infringement. The letter from Gabriel Miller, Paramount Skydance’s head of intellectual property, was addressed to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
That came after Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter Friday to ByteDance asserting the company’s AI platforms are making available “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.” “ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” David Singer, a partner at Jenner & Block, wrote on behalf of Disney.
Seedance is the latest AI video system to set off alarms across Hollywood. After videos generated by ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 went viral this week — including one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop (pictured above) — the Motion Picture Association condemned ByteDance on Thursday, calling on the company to immediately cease its infringing conduct. Actors union SAG-AFTRA and the Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition of artists’ rights groups affiliated with Hollywood unions, also spoke out against the ByteDance AI model.
Paramount’s Miller, in the letter to ByteDance, wrote that “much of the content that the Seed Platforms produce contains vivid depictions of Paramount’s famous and iconic franchises and characters, which are protected under copyright law, trademark law, and the law of unfair competition (among other doctrines).” The content in the AI-generated images and videos produced by ByteDance’s platforms “is often indistinguishable, both visually and audibly,” from Paramount’s copyrighted characters and stories.
Reps for ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
According to Miller’s letter, Paramount properties including “South Park,” “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Star Trek,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “The Godfather,” “Dora the Explorer” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender” have “all been repeatedly infringed by the Seed Platforms’ production and subsequent public performance and distribution of these images and videos.” Moreover, with the recent release of the Seedance 2.0 video generation tool, “ByteDance’s infringing activities appear not only to be continuing but becoming more prevalent and the unlawful outputs more widely disseminated,” Miller wrote.
In the letter, Paramount Skydance demanded that “ByteDance immediately take all necessary steps to (i) prevent violations of our intellectual property rights by ensuring that our content is not used or created by ByteDance or the Seed Platforms going forward, and (ii) remove all infringing instances of Paramount’s content from ByteDance’s platforms and systems.”