As Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale” using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing images and videos.
On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement in its AI systems.
“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,” reads the letter to Google’s general counsel from law firm Jenner & Block on behalf of Disney.
The letter continued, “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.”
According to the letter, which Variety has reviewed, Disney alleges that Google’s AI systems and services infringe Disney characters including those from “Frozen,” “The Lion King,” “Moana,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Deadpool,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Toy Story,” “Brave,” “Ratatouille,” “Monsters Inc.,” “Lilo & Stich,” “Inside Out” and franchises such as Star Wars, the Simpsons, and Marvel’s Avengers and Spider-Man. In its letter, Disney included examples of images it claims were generated by text prompts in Google’s AI apps, including of Darth Vader (pictured above).
The allegations against Google follows cease-and-desist letters that Disney sent earlier to Meta and Character.AI, as well as litigation Disney filed together with NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery against AI companies Midjourney and Minimax alleging copyright infringement.
Asked for comment, a Google spokesperson said, “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.”
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According to Disney, the company has been raising its concerns with Google for months — but says Google hasn’t done anything in response, and that i anything, Google’s infringement has only increased during that time.
Bob Iger, Disney’s CEO, in an interview with CNBC Thursday, said, “Well, we’ve been aggressive at protecting our IP, and we’ve gone after other companies that have not honored our IP, not respected our IP, not valued it. And this is another example of us doing just that.”
Iger said Disney had been in discussions with Google “basically expressing our concerns” about its AI systems’ alleged infringement. “And ultimately, because we didn’t really make any progress, the conversations didn’t bear fruit, we felt we had no choice but to send them a cease-and-desist [letter].”
Disney’s letter to Google demands 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 said Google must “immediately implement effective technological measures within Google’s AI Services and, as necessary, Google’s suite of products and services in which Google’s AI Services are integrated, to ensure that no future outputs infringe Disney works.
“Disney will not tolerate the unauthorized commercial exploitation of its copyrighted characters and works by so-called AI services,” Disney’s cease-and-desist letter to Google says. “Here, Google’s conduct is particularly harmful because Google is leveraging its market dominance across multiple channels to distribute its AI Services and using the draw and popularity of infringed copyrighted works to help maintain that dominance.”
Disney alleged that Google promoted a recent viral trend involving the creation of images of “figurines,” citing this post on X by Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. According to Disney, Google has even supplied its own Gemini AI prompt to encourage users to take part in this trend, which “can be used to quickly and easily generate images of figurines of Disney’s copyrighted characters,” the letter says.
The Disney lawyers included images of the alleged infringing figurine images in its letter:
From Variety US