Motion Picture Association

The Motion Picture Association sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance in February 2026 over ByteDance's video generation model Seedance 2.0, alleging "systemic infringement" — the first time the MPA had taken such action against a major generative AI company. The letter cited Seedance-generated clips featuring copyrighted characters including Shrek, SpongeBob, Darth Vader and Deadpool, arguing the scale of infringement was a deliberate product feature rather than inadvertent output. Seedance subsequently halted its global rollout.

Founded in 1922, the Motion Picture Association is the trade body representing the six major US film studios: Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony Pictures and Amazon MGM. Its primary mandate is to protect the commercial interests of its members through lobbying, anti-piracy enforcement and international market access advocacy. The MPA's film rating system (G through NC-17) is its best-known public function, but its legal and policy work — particularly on copyright enforcement — is its primary commercial role for member studios.

The Seedance cease-and-desist marks the MPA's entry into the generative AI copyright wars at scale. The association's willingness to name a Chinese tech company and a specific AI model publicly raises the stakes of the global debate over whether AI models trained on copyrighted content constitute infringement — and positions the MPA as the enforcement Arm for Hollywood's IP interests in the AI era.