ByteDance, Seedance 2.0 and the Hyperscaler Game
The delay of the global rollout of Seedance 2.0 is not a copyright story. It is a market fragmentation story — and it points us exactly to where IP value is headed.
Last month, TikTok-owner Bytedance released Seedance 2.0 in China. It resulted in a flood of “fan fiction” across social media, and mostly fight scenes with Hollywood IP and likenesses: Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise, George Costanza delivering a kung-fu kick to Jerry Seinfeld and a giant cat fighting Godzilla.
Yesterday, The Information reported that ByteDance has delayed the global launch of Seedance 2.0 due to “a string of copyright disputes with major Hollywood studios and streaming platforms”. ByteDance had previously assured the market of IP holders that it is “taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”
Those assurances do not yet appear to be enough. Its legal team is “working to identify and resolve any potential legal problems”, and its engineers are “putting in guardrails to prevent the model from spitting out content that could cause further intellectual property breaches.”
Both this story and OpenAI’s decision to integrate Sora into ChatGPT—a move which would launch Disney likenesses to an exponentially larger audience—imply that the supply of legacy media IP is strategically important to the international growth of hyperscaler platforms. If Seedance’s launch is precedent, “fanfiction” will become the dominant use case—so legacy media must pre-empt a future of anyone with access to a hyperscaler platform to use their IP freely and without parameters.
