Paramount Skydance has accused ByteDance of engaging in “blatant infringement” of intellectual property with its SeaDance Video and SeedDream image generation AI platforms, alleging that the Chinese internet giant has illegally appropriated IP from films such as “South Park,” “Star Trek,” “The Godfather” and “Dora the Explorer.”
The media company sent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance on Saturday, a copy of which was obtained by Variety, demanding that the alleged infringement cease. The letter from Paramount Skydance’s head of intellectual property, Gabriel Miller, was addressed to ByteDance CEO Liang Lubo.
This comes after Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance on Friday, alleging that the company’s AI platform is 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 de facto usurpation of Disney’s intellectual property is intentional, pervasive, and completely unacceptable,” David Singer, a partner at Jenner & Block, wrote on behalf of Disney.
Seedance is a state-of-the-art AI video system that sends alerts across Hollywood. After videos generated using ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0, including a rooftop brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt posted by filmmaker and VFX artist Rawiri Robinson (pictured above), went viral this week, the Motion Picture Association of America on Thursday condemned ByteDance and called on the company to immediately stop its infringing practices. Actors union SAG-AFTRA and the Human Artistry Campaign, a coalition of artists’ rights groups affiliated with Hollywood unions, also spoke out against ByteDance’s AI model.
“Much of the content produced by the Seed Platform includes vivid depictions of Paramount’s well-known and iconic franchises and characters, and is protected by copyright, trademark, and unfair competition laws (among other things),” Paramount’s Miller wrote in a letter to ByteDance. The AI-generated image and video content produced by ByteDance’s platform is “often visually and audibly indistinguishable” from Paramount’s copyrighted characters and stories.
A ByteDance representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Paramount’s properties, including South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer and Avatar: The Airbender, “have all been repeatedly infringed upon through the production of Seed Platform and the subsequent public performance and distribution of these images and videos,” Miller’s letter said. Additionally, with the recent release of the video generation tool Seedance 2.0, “ByteDance’s infringing activity not only continues, it appears to be becoming more pervasive, and its illegal output appears to be spreading more widely,” Miller wrote.
In the letter, Paramount Skydance demanded that “ByteDance immediately take all necessary steps to (i) prevent infringement of our intellectual property rights by ensuring that our content is no longer used or created by ByteDance or the Seed Platform, and (ii) remove all infringing instances of Paramount’s content from ByteDance’s platforms and systems.”
