The Disney-OpenAI deal redefines the AI ​​copyright war

Thursday, Disney and OpenAI He announced a deal that might have seemed unthinkable not long ago. Starting next year, OpenAI will be able to use Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Ariel, and Yoda in its game. Sora model for video generation. Disney will take a $1 billion stake in OpenAI, and its employees will have access to the company’s APIs and ChatGPT. None of this makes sense, unless Disney is fighting a fight they can’t win.

Disney has been an aggressive litigator with its intellectual property. Along with intellectual property leader Universal, Midjourney was sued in June over output that allegedly infringes on classic film and television characters. The night before the OpenAI deal was announced, Disney reported Send a cease and desist letter to Google for alleged “large-scale” copyright infringement.

On the surface, there seems to be some dissonance with Disney embracing OpenAI while attacking its competitors. But Hollywood is likely taking a similar path to media publishers when it comes to AI, signing licensing agreements where it can and resorting to litigation when it can’t. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which Signed a deal with OpenAI In August 2024.)

“I think AI companies and copyright holders are starting to understand and come to terms with the fact that neither side will ever win,” says Matthew Sage, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University. While many of these cases are still making their way through the courts, so far it appears that the models’ inputs — the training data from which these models learn — are covered by fair use. But it’s the deal about the output — what the model returns based on your claim — that’s where intellectual property rights holders like Disney have a much stronger argument.

Reaching an outcome agreement solves a set of messy and potentially unsolvable problems. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at Wendy’s, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway — or a user might be able to work their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. It is this tension that legal scholars call… “Snoopy’s problem” But in this case you could also call it a Disney problem.

“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to consider licensing arrangements,” Sage says.