ByteDance mandated that the AI generator Seedance 2.0 be trained to avoid copying Hollywood actors and characters.

Seedance 2.0, a service from Chinese giant ByteDance that allows generating realistic videos from text prompts, has sparked a wave of legal complaints from film studios, rights holders, and celebrities. They demand a ban on copying their intellectual property and public likenesses without consent.

1. What happened?
- Launch of Seedance 2.0: Immediately after its appearance on social media, thousands of videos featuring copyrighted characters and images resembling real celebrities appeared.
- The U.S. is the focal point: Most disputed likenesses are American, so rights holders from the United States turned to the service.

2. ByteDance’s reaction
> “We are strengthening existing protective mechanisms to prevent unlawful use of intellectual property and resemblance to well-known personalities by users,” said company representatives in a CNBC interview.
ByteDance pledged to implement new filters and checks that take rights holders’ interests into account.

3. Claims from industry organizations
- MPA (Motion Picture Association)
- Represents major studios and Netflix.
- Asked ByteDance to “stop the unlawful use of protected likenesses” immediately.
- Stated that such actions violate U.S. law and could lead to job losses in the United States.

- Disney
- Officially demanded the cessation of its characters’ usage.
- Claims ByteDance trained its model on a “pirate” library of publicly available images.
- Last year, Disney entered an agreement with OpenAI that allows recognizable characters in generated videos.

- Paramount Skydance
- A week before Disney’s letter, it also approached ByteDance demanding the halt of intellectual property violations.

4. Outcomes and prospects
ByteDance is working on new content protection mechanisms, but the question remains open: how to balance innovation in AI video generation with respect for copyright? For the industry, this signals a need for stricter rules and transparent agreements between technology companies and rights holders.