Disney Says Google AI Infringes Copyright 'On a Massive Scale'
- Reference: 0180364287
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/11/2141219/disney-says-google-ai-infringes-copyright-on-a-massive-scale
- Source link:
> The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. There has been legal wrangling over the role of copyright in the AI era, but the mother of all legal teams may now be gearing up for a fight. Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company's AI tools are [1]infringing Disney's copyrights "on a massive scale ." According to [2]the letter , Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate's intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a "large corpus" of Disney's works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google's image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters -- they couldn't do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.
>
> The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing "copies of its protected works" to consumers. So all those memes you've been making with Disney characters? Yeah, Disney doesn't like that, either. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars. The company calls on Google to immediately stop using Disney content in its AI tools and create measures to ensure that future AI outputs don't produce any characters that Disney owns. Disney is famously litigious and has an army of lawyers dedicated to defending its copyrights. The nature of copyright law in the US is a direct result of Disney's legal maneuvering, which has extended its control of iconic characters by decades. While Disney wants its characters out of Google AI generally, the letter specifically cited the AI tools in YouTube. Google has started adding its Veo AI video model to YouTube, allowing creators to more easily create and publish videos. That seems to be a greater concern for Disney than image models like Nano Banana.
"We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them," Google said in a statement. "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."
The cease and desist letter arrives at the same time the company announced a content deal with OpenAI. Disney said it's [3]investing $1 billion in OpenAI via a three-year licensing deal that will let users generate AI-powered short videos and images featuring more than 200 characters.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/12/disney-says-google-ai-infringes-copyright-on-a-massive-scale/
[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/disney-google-ai-copyright-infringement-cease-and-desist-letter-1236606429/
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/12/11/1522244/disney-puts-1-billion-into-openai-licenses-200-characters-for-ai-generated-videos-and-images
Don't fuck with The Mouse! (Score:2)
Google's about to learn.
Re: Don't fuck with The Mouse! (Score:2)
Be interesting to see. Not sure how scary Disney is to a company as big as google.
lets have an $25/day jury deside who wins! (Score:1)
lets have an $25/day jury deside who wins!
Re: (Score:2)
In California it's $15/day. And it doesn't include the first day.
[1]https://www.sacbee.com/news/ca... [sacbee.com]
[1] https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article305994961.html
Re: (Score:2)
Sad, because minimum wage is $17/hour.
Re: lets have an $25/day jury deside who wins! (Score:1)
Are you saying the opinion of 12 peers is of less value because of the amount the state legally defines as their compensation?
It's a shake down (Score:2)
Disney is already licensing their content to OpenAI.
[1]https://www.wsj.com/business/m... [wsj.com]
This isn't an AI vs Art showdown. This is just a licensing deal shakedown.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/disney-to-invest-1-billion-in-openai-license-characters-for-use-in-chatgpt-sora-3a4916e2
Let them fight! (Score:2)
And hopefully both can lose. Disney spent years refusing to pay contracted royalties to authors of the IP it purchased. Its executives and shareholders can all go broke.
Small businesses will suffer for this (Score:2)
We have no more public domain. Almost everything in the past century is copyrighted by someone, and disney has bought up a significant portion of the creative works that came out, despite being a company that started on the public domain.
If we had the same setup back then, the works that were put out in the 1930s and 1940s would have been under copyright still from the late 1800s.
Throw in on top of that, most of the usage is for non-commercial use for their copyrighted stuff. If someone is using it to make
Good (Score:3)
Ah yes. Two companies with dodgy behavior and deep pockets getting set for a court battle. Bring out the popcorn!
Re: (Score:1)
I am rooting for Disney to win and set a precedent that training an AI on copyrighted content without permission from the copyright holder of that content is illegal. Bring down the whole "generative AI" house of cards (since basically all these AIs are trained on content without permission)