Google has started removing multiple AI-generated videos featuring various Disney characters from its popular video-sharing platform YouTube. The move comes after legal pressure from Disney, with a cease-and-desist letter in relation to copyright violations. These videos used popular Disney characters such as Deadpool, Moana, Mickey Mouse, and figures from the Star Wars universe.
Disney vs Google: Here’s what happened
Disney's letter accused Google of 'infringing Disney's copyrights on a massive scale,' and multiple reports from Deadline and Variety have confirmed that. YouTube users who tried to access videos featuring AI-generated Disney characters were reportedly able to open and view them last Thursday. Still, only a day later, these were no longer available “due to a copyright claim by Disney.”
Further, the letter accuses Google not only of hosting such videos on YouTube but also of using clips from Disney movies to train its AI models, including Veo and Nano Banana, without permission. This comes as the century-old entertainment company is actively seeking to protect its characters from unlicensed AI use and the removal of flagged YouTube links, including YouTube Shorts videos, from ‘Frozen,’ ‘Moana,’ ‘Toy Story,’ and ‘Winnie the Pooh.’
Recently, Disney announced a new partnership with OpenAI, which allows Disney characters to officially appear in OpenAI’s tools, including Sora and ChatGPT. This suggests that Disney has no anti-AI sentiment and only wants to flag off content on any platform that uses its content without permission. Previously, Disney had filed lawsuits against Character.AI, Midjourney, and Hailuo for similar infringements.
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