Senators: “Seedance 2.0 poses a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and, more broadly, to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.) and U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, today urged ByteDance to immediately shut down ‘Seedance 2.0,’ the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) generation model, following the platform’s egregious infringement of copyrighted materials belonging to American and global innovators. In their letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, the Senators highlighted how Seedance 2.0 is fueling theft of American creative work and called on the company to implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further U.S. copyright law infringements.
“Within the first 24 hours of Seedance 2.0—an advanced AI video generation model—going live on February 12th, social media users had already used the platform to generate a brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that never happened; they had rewritten the ending of Stranger Things; and they had staged a battle between Thanos and Superman on the surface of Mars,” wrote the Senators. “These were not obscure experiments—they were viral moments, racking up millions of views and celebrating, openly and enthusiastically, the theft of American creative work. One content creator shared a comparison of a clip from the film F1 and a near-exact copy generated by Seedance, claiming the AI model replicated the most expensive shot in the film for nine cents. Nine cents.”
The Senators continued: “Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections. By releasing Seedance 2.0 without any effort to obtain licenses for training materials or prevent unlawful and infringing outputs, ByteDance has shown it is willing to violate U.S. federal law and steal the intellectual property of American creators for its own monetary gain. America’s copyright laws—and Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of our Constitution—grant creators broad, exclusive rights to determine how their works are used by others.”
“Seedance 2.0 poses a direct threat to the American intellectual property system and, more broadly, to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community. The reckless way that Seedance 2.0 was released without any regard for the rights of creators has been rightly denounced by multiple creative community stakeholders and experts and now—justifiably in our view—faces massive litigation risk due to the industrial-scale copyright infringement and deepfake abuses that have resulted,” wrote the Senators.
The Senators concluded: “We view your recent pledges to ‘strengthen current safeguards’ and prevent the mass infringement of American intellectual property as a delay tactic to continue to abuse the innovators and profit from their success. Your disregard for American intellectual property is part of a larger trend of artificial intelligence companies stealing protected work at the expense of the creative community. If ByteDance wishes to build sustainable economic ties with democratic, free market economies, it must immediately shut down Seedance 2.0 to cease the mass infringement and related harms it has perpetrated, and excise unlicensed intellectual property from its data holdings.”
Read and download the Senators’ full letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
Senators Welch and Blackburn have led bipartisan efforts to protect the arts and artists’ creativity in the Senate. In December, Senators Welch and Blackburn introduced the Visual Artists Copyright Reform Act (VACRA), bipartisan legislation to modernize copyright registration for visual artists and make it easier for high-volume visual artists to register and protect their works. Senators Welch and Blackburn also reintroduced their bipartisan Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act, legislation to help musicians, artists, writers, and others access the courts to protect their copyrighted works if, and when, they are used to train generative AI models.
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