On the same day that Disney cut a billion dollar deal with OpenAI for the use of its intellectual property in SORA, news came out that Disney went after Google for the same thing. Disney accused Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale.” Much like its lawsuit against Midjourney, Disney accused Google of exploiting its characters and distributing infringing images and videos. They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google to get them to stop the infringement.

In response, Google has removed dozens of AI-generated videos featuring Disney’s characters. In their letter, Disney flagged YouTube videos and demanded they were removed.

On Thursday, those links were working and now a message reads, “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Disney.”

Google released a statement that it would work with Disney on the issue:

We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them,” the company said. “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.

Disney also demanded Google implement safeguards to prevent AI tools from generating Disney-owned characters and cease using Disney’s characters to train its AI models.

On the same day that Disney cuts a billion dollar deal with OpenAI for the use of its intellectual property in SORA, news has come out that Disney is going after Google for the same thing.

Disney is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale.” Much like its lawsuit against Midjourney, Disney accuses Google of exploiting its characters and distributing infringing images and videos.

Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google to get them to stop the alleged infringement.

Google is infringing Disney’s copyrights on a massive scale, by copying a large corpus of Disney’s copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop generative artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models and services, and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney’s copyrights.

Google operates as a virtual vending machine, capable of reproducing, rendering, and distributing copies of Disney’s valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on a mass scale. And compounding Google’s blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google’s AI Services are branded with Google’s Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google’s exploitation of Disney’s intellectual property is authorized and endorsed by Disney.

Disney included examples of images it alleges infringes. Disney has also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Meta and Character.AI.

A Google spokesperson stated:

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.

Disney has said they have attempted to engage with Google for months but Google hasn’t done anything to combat the issue and the infringement has increased over that time.

Disney is asking for them to cease “copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney’s copyrighted characters.” They also want the implementation of measures to prevent further infringement.

With a billion dollar investment in one company, a lawsuit against another, and threats against others, stories of what lead up to each will hopefully eventually come out. OpenAI isn’t profitable and burning through cash, needing billions in investments to keep up the charade. Compare that to Google’s profitability which allows it to reject deals like Disney may have been proposing behind the scenes which involves the use of generated video on Disney+. Google has Youtube, which has been named as part of the dissemination of the material. Google wouldn’t want to share the generated content, or give it to Disney exclusively stream, wanting it for their own platform. Same as Meta with Facebook. OpenAI has no platform currently to which to do that. It’s likely Disney is suing those that aren’t buying whatever Disney is really selling when it comes to AI.