Disney announced a billion dollar agreement with OpenAI this morning over use of its characters, and Google’s going to have to pray it doesn’t alter the deal any further.
Alongside the decision to offer up its most iconic imagery and characters for use with Sora — OpenAI’s cross between an AI video generation tool and a social network — Disney is going after Google’s own use of its IP in its own genAI tools. As reported by Ars Technica, Disney issued a cease-and-desist letter to Google on Wednesday evening, hours before the Sora agreement was made official, accusing the company of copyright infringement and requesting an immediate end to using these characters for both training data and within apps like YouTube.
Disney’s letter calls out specific franchises, including Frozen, The Lion King, Moana, The Little Mermaid, Lilo and Stitch, Toy Story, Star Wars, and the MCU, as the IP Google’s AI tools are currently capable of generating. The company’s lawyers are requesting Google “immediately cease further copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney’s copyrighted characters,” specifically but not necessarily limited to YouTube and its various off-shoots, like Shorts.
As reported by Variety, which published portions of the letter, Disney CEO Bob Iger confirmed his company had held “conversations” with Google for months prior to beginning legal action, but felt Google hadn’t made any in-roads into making changes over its own internal policies. Despite Nano Banana not being specified in today’s cease-and-desist, Disney did include AI-generated figurine images in its claim, arguing Sundar Pichai taking part in an associated viral trend encouraged further drove copyright infringement by users.
Google shared the following statement with Ars Technica:
We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them. 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.
Today’s news is just the latest chapter in the ongoing cold war between Google and Disney, just about a month after settling their dispute over YouTube TV carriage fees.
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