Disney vs. Google and OpenAI
Caitlin Huston (The Verge, Variety):
In the letter, sent Wednesday, Disney says there has been copyright infringement on a “massive scale,” given its claims that Google has been using AI models and services to “commercially exploit and distribute copies” across many channels, including Google Workspace applications and the YouTube mobile application.
“Google has deeply embedded its infringing video and image AI Services into its broad family of products and services actively used by over a billion people. This multiplies the scope of Google’s infringement, and harm to Disney’s intellectual property, not to mention the ill-gotten benefits Google enjoys from its unauthorized exploitation of Disney’s copyrighted works,” the letter reads.
OpenAI (Hacker News, CNBC, Hacker News):
As part of this three-year licensing agreement, Sora will be able to generate short, user-prompted social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters.
[…]
Alongside the licensing agreement, Disney will become a major customer of OpenAI, using its APIs to build new products, tools, and experiences, including for Disney+, and deploying ChatGPT for its employees.
As part of the agreement, Disney will make a $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI, and receive warrants to purchase additional equity.
No details on the licensing agreement, but my guess is that, like the Apple-Gemini deal, OpenAI isn’t paying enough to offset the flow going the other way. I thought Disney would want to keep tighter control over their IP, but it seems like they’re using it to buy a lottery ticket.
So that’s not just a one-two punch, it’s more like a one-two-three-four punch combo. With this last bit being key because Disney is obviously now going to be directly incentivized to favor any work and partnerships with OpenAI.
[…]
So is Disney doing the right thing here? Time obviously will tell, but this is also fairly limited in scope – both time-bound and IP-bound – clearly on purpose. And working with a company to ensure better oversight of IP infractions seems like a better move than simply suing. Sorry, Midjourney, Character.ai, and now Google!
Previously:
- The New York Times Sues Perplexity
- Netflix Buys Warner Bros.
- White Label Gemini on Private Cloud Compute
- Sora App
- Only Google Can Crawl Reddit
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I wonder if this is at least partially an attempt to establish a “market” for licensing their IP for AI-generated content. If so, that could become a factor in litigation regarding fair use, where the impact of an infringement on a market is considered. Not sure.
I honestly wish this whole "ai" thing would crash and burn asap. I see it lumbering on for two more years with increasingly desperate things happening.
No junior devs will be hired, then all of a sudden there won't be any subsidised models to do their work and then what? We're on this journey at my job. The first drafts of rather advanced solutions we crank out in a couple of working days would take weeks.
So why hire? Everyone get cracking with Claude!
One side benefit for them: they’re setting a market price for licensing their IP — which they can leverage as they sue Google and anyone else who uses their IP without a license.
I think it’ll be interesting to see if/how it sets a market price/floor for other copyright infringements for other lawsuits.
"I honestly wish this whole "ai" thing would crash and burn asap."
While the large LLM-focused companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, or xAI will very likely fail (if they're allowed to, given how much of the stock market growth is directly linked to them), Google and Microsoft won't. Either way, the technology is here to stay.
We will never go back to a point in time when the Internet wasn't full of AI slop.
"then all of a sudden there won't be any subsidised models to do their work and then what"
Mistral just released Devstral 2, a model whose performance is not too far off from something like Gemini 3. It runs well on four H100-class GPUs. This means that mid-sized companies can run this model in-house right now. If these companies actually fail, millions of these GPUs will become available on the secondary market, and their cost will go down.
There will never be a point at which it's not economically feasible to run code-generation models.
It's grim. I've started thinking about other lines of work. But it's not just because I don't feel like spending my days babysitting an llm, it's more that I feel that Silicon Valley has ruined tech with their greed.
