Walt Disney has sent a formal letter to ByteDance, alleging that the company used Disney's copyrighted works without authorization while training and developing its Seedance 2.0 model. The letter demands that ByteDance immediately cease the infringing activities and refrain from future violations.

The correspondence, drafted by Disney's attorney David Singer and addressed to ByteDance's Global Chief Legal Officer John Rogovin, accuses ByteDance's Seedance service of incorporating a preloaded library of pirated material featuring Disney's copyrighted characters. The alleged infringement involves multiple intellectual properties, including Star Wars and Marvel. Disney criticized ByteDance's approach, stating it treats these highly commercialized IPs as if they were "free public domain clip art."

Disney further asserted that despite its public objections, ByteDance continues to "hijack" Disney characters through reproduction, distribution, and creation of derivative works. The company characterized this behavior as "virtual smash-and-grab" operations, describing them as "deliberate, widespread, and entirely unacceptable."

David Singer emphasized in the letter that the infringement observed on Seedance might represent merely the "tip of the iceberg." This assessment is particularly striking given that Seedance had been operational for only two days at the time of the complaint.

Previous reports indicated that on February 12, Doubao announced the official integration of its video generation model Seedance 2.0 across Doubao's mobile app, desktop, and web platforms. The Seedance 2.0 model supports original audio-visual synchronization, multi-shot long narratives, and multimodal controllable generation.

Compared to its predecessor version 1.5, Seedance 2.0 demonstrates substantially improved generation quality with higher usability in complex interactive and motion scenarios. The model shows significant enhancements in physical accuracy, realism, controllability, and better alignment with industrial-grade creative requirements.

Notably, Doubao's Seedance 2.0 currently does not support uploading real-person images as subject references. Practical testing confirms that the platform cannot generate videos related to celebrities at present.

Doubao explained that such synthesized content involving real celebrities combined with specific brands is subject to strict platform regulations primarily to achieve two objectives: first, to avoid infringement risks related to portrait rights and endorsement relationships; second, to prevent misinterpretation as official endorsements and the spread of false information.