ByteDance strikes AI copyright deal with Hollywood's Motion Picture Association

ByteDance signs AI copyright pact with Hollywood trade group

Aug 17 (Reuters) - ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association on Monday signed an agreement to strengthen copyright safeguards on the Chinese company's AI video and image-generation models, months after the Hollywood trade group challenged its handling of intellectual property. The deal, which ⁠covers ByteDance's Seedance video and Seedream image-generation models, follows a cease-and-desist letter the MPA sent in February over these tools. Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

ByteDance agrees to reel in its AI models to protect Hollywood IPs - Engadget

TikTok's parent company signed a memorandum of understanding with The Motion Picture Association. Hollywood and ByteDance have seemingly squashed their beef revolving around AI models infringing on studios' intellectual property. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) announced in a press release that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with TikTok's parent company, which details a shared framework to protect against copyright infringement of the trade group's members. The MPA, whose members include Disney, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, said that "this agreement represents significant cooperation between the two organizations." The trade association even added that ByteDance's latest release of Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5 reflect its "continued advances in IP protections." According to the press release, this memorandum applies to all AI models from ByteDance, including those used on TikTok, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, CapCut and Dreamina. The memorandum comes after the MPA sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance in February, accusing the company's AI models of using copyrighted material without permission. Shortly after, ByteDance responded by pledging it would strengthen its safeguards around unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness, even later reportedly suspending Seedance 2.0's global rollout. Since then, MPA's CEO and chair, Charles Rivkin, said the association has had "constructive engagement" with the ByteDance, adding that the Chinese company has implemented "meaningful guardrails" with its AI models. On the other hand, Hollywood studios are currently in court for a lawsuit against Midjourney, also accusing it of copyright infringement.

ByteDance signs a copyright pact with Hollywood's MPA to rein in its Seedance AI video tool

The TikTok owner has agreed a pact with the Motion Picture Association, the trade body for the major US studios, to tighten copyright protections on its AI image and video generators, ending, at least officially, a standoff that began when the studios accused the company of building a machine for wholesale infringement. The agreement covers Seedance, ByteDance's video-generation model, and Seedream, its image counterpart, the tools that sit behind AI features in TikTok, the CapCut editor and the Dreamina app. ByteDance says newer versions of the models already carry stronger intellectual-property safeguards, though neither side has spelled out what those guardrails actually are, and the two have pledged to keep cooperating as the technology moves on. The détente follows a genuinely bitter row. In February, after Seedance 2.0 appeared, the MPA fired off a cease-and-desist letter and did not mince words, calling the tool an engine of "systemic infringement" in which copyright violation looked less like a bug than a design feature. Individual studios, among them Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros, Paramount and Sony, had already sent their own warnings; Disney pointed to viral clips featuring Marvel and Star Wars characters, and Japan opened a separate inquiry into anime look-alikes. Crucially, the MPA's complaint had two prongs. One was about outputs, that Seedance would cheerfully generate recognisable copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses on demand. The other, thornier, was about inputs, that ByteDance had trained the model on studio content in the first place, without permission. This week's pact reads as an answer to the first grievance far more than the second. That distinction matters, because output filters are the easy part. Bolting on guardrails so a model politely declines to draw Iron Man is a solvable engineering problem; it does nothing to resolve whether the film libraries were scraped to teach the model what Iron Man looks like to begin with. The training-data question is the one tearing through every corner of the AI copyright wars, from studios forcing image generators to reveal what they learned from to a rash of publisher lawsuits, and no handshake with ByteDance settles it. Still, the deal is a notable win for an industry that has spent two years largely on the back foot. Hollywood has watched OpenAI pull its Sora app amid legal and reputational heat, seen the Oscars ban AI actors and AI-written scripts, and generally struggled to impose terms on a technology moving faster than the courts. Extracting written commitments from ByteDance, a Chinese company with an audience the studios covet and fear in roughly equal measure, is leverage they will want to bank. It also makes ByteDance one of the first major AI-video developers to strike a formal understanding with Hollywood rather than meet it in court, a template the MPA will surely wave at every rival generator next. The caveats are considerable, though. The specifics are undisclosed, which makes the guardrails impossible to assess from the outside and easy to loosen quietly; enforcement across TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina, at the scale those apps operate, is a formidable undertaking But a voluntary pact is not a licensing deal, so the studios are not obviously being paid for whatever their catalogues may already have taught these models. It is a truce, not a settlement. What the agreement really signals is a change of posture. Rather than try to litigate ByteDance into submission, an uncertain prospect against a company headquartered beyond easy reach of US courts, Hollywood has chosen to negotiate guardrails it can point to today. Whether that hardens into the licensing regime the studios ultimately want, or merely buys quiet until the next model drops, is the open question. Seedance will keep improving, and the lawyers, on all sides, are not going anywhere.

ByteDance signs AI copyright pact with Hollywood trade group

ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association on Monday signed an agreement to strengthen copyright safeguards on the Chinese company's AI video and image-generation models, months after the Hollywood trade group challenged its handling of intellectual property. The deal, which ⁠covers ByteDance's Seedance video and Seedream image-generation models, follows a cease-and-desist letter the MPA sent in February over these tools. Disney and other studios in February raised concerns the AI tools could generate content featuring copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses ⁠without authorization. ByteDance said newer versions of the models include stronger intellectual-property protections. Models are offered through services including TikTok, CapCut ⁠and Dreamina. The MPA's challenge came amid concerns that Seedance could generate content featuring copyrighted film ⁠and television characters without permission. Both sides said they will continue collaborating ⁠on safeguards for copyrighted content as AI technology evolves.

Motion Picture Association Inks AI IP Protection Deal With ByteDance

Six months after a fully AI-generated viral video of Tom Cruise battling Brad Pitt took the internet by storm, the tech behind the ripoff has been tweaked to protect Hollywood intellectual property and likenesses. The Motion Picture Association on Monday said that it had reached a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Chinese tech giant ByteDance that will provide "strong guardrails" within its tech and platforms that will protect Hollywood. The agreement covers Seedance, the AI video model that generated the Cruise vs. Pitt video, as well as Seedream 5.0 Lite, TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina, among others. The launch of Seedance and the ensuing deal bears a striking similarity to Sora, OpenAI's video model, which launched last year with a flurry of unauthorized videos featuring well-known characters and people, only to fizzle out after the tech giant agreed to pull back on the ripoffs. OpenAI ended up killing Sora earlier this year. ByteDance, however, is continuing to invest in Seedance, which has become one of the most advanced video models alongside offerings from Google and others. "Today's agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry - and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content," said MPA Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin in a statement. "For the past several months, we have had constructive engagement with ByteDance to implement meaningful guardrails on Seedance and Seedream, and this MOU reflects our shared determination to continue our work together to further fortify those guardrails." "ByteDance respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world, and we believe responsible innovation in AI goes hand in hand with meaningful protections for rightsholders," adds John Rogovin, general counsel of ByteDance. "We appreciate the productive engagement with the MPA and its members as we continue to strengthen safeguards across our generative AI services. This MOU establishes an important framework for continued collaboration as the technology evolves, across a variety of products and platforms."

Hollywood cuts first-ever AI copyright deal with TikTok's ByteDance

Hollywood's top copyright cops and TikTok's parent company have called a truce in their war over artificial intelligence. The Motion Picture Association (MPA) and ByteDance announced a surprise deal Monday to slap tough safety guardrails on the Chinese tech giant's powerful AI video and image generators, including Seedance and Seedream. The newly inked agreement guarantees that ByteDance's newest AI tech will respect Hollywood's intellectual property rights, preventing users from prompting AI to cook up bootleg blockbusters or knock-off movie stars. "Copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry," MPA Chief Charles Rivkin said in a statement Monday. He added that both parties had discussions for several months "to implement meaningful guardrails on Seedance and Seedream," which are offered by TikTok, the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, CapCut and Dreamina. ByteDance General Counsel John Rogovin added that the Chinese company "respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world." "We believe responsible innovation in AI goes hand in hand with meaningful protections for rightsholders," Rogovin said. The peace treaty comes after the MPA fired off a fierce cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance back in February of this year. The studios raised concerns that the rogue AI tools were hijacking iconic characters and celebrity faces without asking for permission after videos generated by Seedance 2.0 went viral in China including one of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a fight. Disney had accused ByteDance of pre-packaging Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as if they were public-domain clip art. The letter alleged that Seedance was reproducing, distributing and creating derivative works featuring Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and other characters. Following the strong pushback from the studios, ByteDance had said that it will take steps to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property on its AI video generator Seedance 2.0 "We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users," ByteDance had said in a Feb. statement.