Late in September, the Wall Street Journal reported that
OpenAI is planning to release a new version of its Sora video generator that creates videos featuring copyright material unless copyright holders opt out of having their work appear…
According to OpenAI’s website, its Sora 2 “is more physically accurate, realistic, and more controllable than prior systems. It also features synchronized dialogue and sound effects.”
However, CNBC reported that
Concerns erupted immediately after Sora videos were created last week featuring everything from James Bond playing poker with Altman to body cam footage of cartoon character Mario evading the police.
404 Media reported,
In the first days of the app, users did what they always do with a new tool in their hands: generate endless chaos, in this case images of Spongebob Squarepants in a Nazi uniform and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shoplifting or throwing Pikachus on the grill.
Days after the Sora 2 launch, the Journal reported that OpenAI had reversed its stance, giving rights-holders more controls and requiring opt-ins.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a blog post,
We are hearing from a lot of rightsholders who are very excited for this new kind of “interactive fan fiction” and think this new kind of engagement will accrue a lot of value to them, but want the ability to specify how their characters can be used (including not at all).
He added that
…we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.
The turnabout came in the wake of criticism of the original “opt out” model – which is not supported by any principle of US copyright law.
As Variety reported, “Leading Hollywood agency CAA issued a statement rejecting OpenAI‘s video model Sora 2,” saying “It is clear that Open AI/Sora exposes our clients and their intellectual property to significant risk.”
In addition, reported Variety,
The Motion Picture Association was one of the first major Hollywood institutions to disavow the OpenAI platform. It said in a statement on Monday, “While OpenAI clarified it will ‘soon’ offer rightsholders more control over character generation, they must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service. OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue. Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here.
The motion picture studios Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. recently sued Midjourney, another generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) company for copyright infringement.
According to Variety,
Midjourney claimed that AI training is “fair use” under copyright law and that if users are infringing on copyrighted IP, they are doing so of their own accord and violating the terms of service.
As we recently blogged, a class action lawsuit representing authors, journalists, and publishers against GenAI company Anthropic recently settled for $1.5 billion. As we noted,
The district court had granted summary judgement for Anthropic in part, finding that its use of the copyrighted works for training was fair use under US copyright law.
However, the district court also found that Anthropic had used and saved to a central library pirated copies of as many as seven million works for training and ordered a trial to determine damages.
According to 404, OpenAI seems to have gotten more cautious about what it allows users to do with its GenAI tool:
Now, Sora 2 refuses to generate all sorts of prompts, including characters that are in the public domain like Steamboat Willie and Winnie the Pooh. “This content may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content,” the app said when I tried to generate Dracula hanging out in Paris, for example.
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