Motion Picture Association reaches agreement with ByteDance over AI guardrails

The Motion Picture Assn. has struck its first agreement with an artificial intelligence company, saying Monday that ByteDance has strengthened copyright guardrails into its AI video and image tools that drew legal threats from every major Hollywood studio in February.

ByteDance, a Chinese company, is the former majority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations.

The MPA, the trade association that lobbies for major studios such as Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, said it has had constructive engagement with ByteDance over the last several months to rein in Seedance, a text-to-video generation tool, and Seedream, which produces images using text commands.

“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry – and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content,” said MPA Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Rivkin.

MPA declined to share the specific guardrails in the agreement.

The agreement comes as some studios have expressed concerns about AI models training on their copyrighted material without permission or compensation. In February, MPA issued a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging Seedance 2.0 was trained on copyrighted material and generating unauthorized videos featuring characters such as “SpongeBob SquarePants” and visuals replicating a scene from sci-fi series “Stranger Things” without studios’ permission. It was the first time the MPA had filed a cease-and-desist letter to a major AI firm.

“ByteDance is engaged in pervasive and widespread infringement of our members’ valuable intellectual property that it must stop immediately,” MPA’s global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote in a Feb. 20 letter to ByteDance’s global general counsel John Rogovin.

ByteDance in response said it was taking steps to strengthen its safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of IP or likeness.

Since then, ByteDance has released Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5, which reflect “ByteDance’s continued advances in IP protections,” the tech company and MPA said in a news release.

“ByteDance respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world, and we believe responsible innovation in AI goes hand in hand with meaningful protections for rightsholders,” ByteDance’s Rogovin said in the statement.

Seedance has emerged as a leader in AI tools among some indie filmmakers, who say it is more cost-effective than other options. AI tech companies are eager to find ways to partner with studios to make their tools better, but are also facing competition from rivals to gain more customers as quickly as possible. That has caused some companies to quickly launch their AI products without first putting in more mechanisms to prevent images from appearing without copyright holders’ permission.