The Motion Picture Association (MPA) has reached its first agreement with TikTok’s parent ByteDance, saying Monday that it had strengthened copyright protections for AI video and image tools. The tools had previously drawn legal threats from Hollywood studios over copyright concerns.
MPA, which represents major studios including Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, said it had engaged constructively with ByteDance over the past several months to strengthen safeguards for Seedance, a text-to-video generation tool, and Seedream, which generates images from text prompts.
“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.
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This comes as studios have expressed concerns over 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 the series “Stranger Things” without permission.
“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. Disney and other U.S. studios also took similar actions.
ByteDance and MPA said that since then, ByteDance has released Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5, which reflect “ByteDance’s continued advances in IP protections.”
“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.
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Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5 are available across ByteDance’s collection of apps, including TikTok, the U.S. variant of TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina.
This move reflects how this technology has caught the attention of Hollywood, while also causing concerns over issues like copyright infringement. Previously, MPA criticized OpenAI’s former video model Sora before the company imposed its own guardrails. OpenAI eventually shut down Sora, its artificial intelligence video-generation app, in less than two years after its launch. The ChatGPT-maker also revealed it will wind down its $1 billion partnership with Disney.
“We appreciate the productive engagement with the MPA and its members as we continue to strengthen safeguards across our generative AI services. This MOU establishes an important framework for continued collaboration as the technology evolves across a variety of products and platforms,” Rogovin said.