What the letter demanded
The Motion Picture Association, representing seven major studios, sent ByteDance a cease and desist letter on Friday, February 20, 2026. It instructed ByteDance to stop training its Seedance 2.0 video model on studios' copyrighted films and television shows, and to install safeguards that stop users from generating those studios' characters. It set a deadline of February 27 for ByteDance to document the specific steps it had taken. [1]
The letter followed an earlier, milder exchange. ByteDance had already told the MPA it "respects copyright protections" and would strengthen existing safeguards. MPA general counsel Karyn Temple called that response inadequate, saying the association's own investigation "continues to reveal examples of Seedance producing material that clearly infringes on our members' rights." [1]
What the letter pointed to
The letter documented Seedance output built from copyrighted characters, including Shrek, SpongeBob, Darth Vader, Deadpool, and characters from Stranger Things, plus a Spider-Man fight sequence that had circulated on X. Temple's letter called the pattern "systemic infringement rather than inadvertence," adding, in the phrase the coverage led with, that "Seedance's copyright infringement is a feature, not a bug." [1]
Atlas interpretation: That wording is doing legal work, not just rhetorical work. A single slipped-through clip is the kind of thing a company can plausibly call an accident, which matters for how willful a court might later find any infringement to be. Citing a spread of characters across a spread of franchises is the MPA building a record that the outputs are a predictable consequence of what Seedance was trained on and how it was shipped, not an edge case its filters missed. [1]
Studios that had sat out earlier fights joined this one
Netflix, Sony, and Paramount, none of which had joined earlier disputes over AI-generated video, sent their own letters alongside Disney and Universal, putting six of the MPA's seven member studios on record against the same company at the same time. [1]
Atlas interpretation: The coverage describes this against OpenAI's own path with Sora 2: after comparable backlash over unauthorized character generation, OpenAI tightened Sora's copyright controls, and Disney chose to license its characters into the app rather than continue fighting it. A cease and desist is the harder opening move by comparison. It is the studios asking a court to be the backstop if ByteDance's answer on February 27 falls short, not the studios proposing terms for a deal. [1]
Sources
- Motion Picture Association Pushes ByteDance to Curb Seedance 2.0 AI Infringement
Variety · Feb 21, 2026