Regulation 2026-08-20

Six months ago Hollywood sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist. This week they signed a truce — and no money changed hands.

ByteDance and the Motion Picture Association, the trade body for the major American studios and streamers, announced a memorandum of understanding on 17 August setting out a global framework for intellectual property protection in generative video and image models. It covers ByteDance's Seedance video model and Seedream image model, and their deployment across TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina. The background is a fight: in February, after Seedance 2.0 shipped and users began producing clips riffing on actors including Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, the MPA sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter, with Disney and other studios pressing the case that the tools could generate copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses without permission. The two sides then built protections into the releases of Seedance 2.5 and Seedream 5.0 Pro last month. MPA chairman Charles Rivkin framed copyright as the cornerstone of the industry. What the memorandum is not is a licensing deal: it is voluntary, and studios receive no payment for their catalogues under it.

Why it mattersThe absence of money is the point worth sitting with. Every other resolution to this fight has taken one of two shapes — a lawsuit, or a licence in which the studios get paid for training data. This is a third: the model maker agrees to build guardrails, the studios agree not to sue for now, and the question of whether the catalogue was worth something in training is left untouched. For ByteDance that is a good trade, because a cease-and-desist from the MPA is the opening move of litigation in the American market it most needs access to. For the studios it buys enforcement they were unlikely to win quickly in court against a Chinese company. But a voluntary framework binds only as long as both sides want it to, and it sets no price, which means it also sets no precedent the next model maker has to match.

#Video #Image Generation

✓ Verified · 4 sources

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2026-08-20

Six months ago Hollywood sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist. This week they signed a truce — and no money changed hands.

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