The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be over. There has been legal controversy over the role of copyright in the AI age, but the mother of all legal teams is now getting ready for battle. Disney has sued Google, saying the company’s AI tools are “rampantly” infringing Disney’s copyrights.
According to the letter, Google is infringing the intellectual property of the entertainment group in many ways. The legal notice says Google copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its Zen AI models, which is believable, because Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters — they just can’t do that without feeding the models a lot of Disney data.
C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers. So all those memes you’ve been making with Disney characters? Yep, even Disney doesn’t like it. The letter calls out a large number of Disney-owned properties that could be brought into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.
The company has called on Google to immediately stop using Disney content in its AI tools and to take measures to ensure that any Disney-owned characters do not originate in future AI outputs. Disney is famously litigious and has an army of lawyers dedicated to defending its copyrights. The nature of copyright law in the US is a direct result of Disney’s legal maneuvering, which has extended its control over iconic characters for decades.
While Disney wants its characters out of Google AI in general, the letter specifically cites AI tools in YouTube. Google has started adding its Veo AI video model to YouTube, allowing creators to more easily create and publish videos. This appears to be a bigger concern for Disney than image models like the Nano Banana.
Google has said little about Disney’s warning—a warning that Google surely knew was coming. A Google spokesperson has issued the following vague statement on the matter.
Google says, “We have a long-standing and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney and we will continue to engage with them.” “In general, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and we’ve created additional innovative copyright controls, like Google-expanded and Content ID for YouTube, that give sites and copyright holders control over their content.”
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