After OpenAI deal, Disney demands Google cease-and-desist

Today, Disney and OpenAI announced a surprising partnership, which will allow ChatGPT users to generate content with Disney's iconic characters.

On the heels of that news, Variety reported that Disney sent Google a cease-and-desist notice on Wednesday evening, threatening legal action over the search giant's alleged use of Disney's intellection property in its AI models. Disney is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale,” claiming Google's AI models “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing media.

Disney has reportedly accused Google of infringing on Disney properties such as Star Wars, Frozen, The Lion King, Moana, The Little Mermaid, Deadpool, and The Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney has also accused Google of encouraging users to take part in Generative AI trends such as prompts that create images of "action figures" depicting Disney-owned characters. According to Variety, images of figurines depicting Darth Vader, Deadpool, Homer Simpson, and Elsa from Frozen were included in examples in the cease-and-desist letter.

Disney's recent actions are certainly interesting. Just this past June, Disney filed a lawsuit against AI image generation company Midjourney over the use of Disney's IP in AI-generated content. At the time, Disney lawyers called Midjourney "a bottomless pit of plagiarism."

So, why has Disney partnered with one, and only one, AI company? By granting OpenAI an exclusive license to use its characters, OpenAI will now be able to argue that Google and other AI companies are violating that license.

When OpenAI launched its AI video platform Sora in October, the company was immediately criticized for allowing users to generate video content utilizing other brands' copyrighted characters. OpenAI eventually announced that any company could opt out of Sora inclusion on a character-by-character basis.

And in Mashable's testing of AI image and video generators, we found that most of these AI tools will readily produce deepfakes featuring Star Wars and Marvel characters.

Now, Disney has demanded that Google “immediately cease further copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney’s copyrighted characters” in “outputs of Google’s AI Services, including through YouTube’s mobile app, YouTube Shorts and YouTube.”

In addition, Disney wants Google to put safeguards in place "to ensure that no future outputs infringe Disney works."

In effect, Disney is putting the AI world on notice.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.