A Trade Group That Includes Studio Ghibli Just Slapped OpenAI with… a Letter

A Japanese trade company that includes heavy-hitting media makers such as Studio Ghibli, Square Enix and Bandai has just announced that it has sent a the letter to OpenAI on October 28 for alleged copyright infringement.

The letter contains some observations about the similarity of “Japanese content” to the Sora 2 video, and issues two requests: it asks OpenAI not to use CODA content as training data without prior permission, and requests that OpenAI “respond sincerely” if any CODA member complains about copyright issues.

Noticeably absent is anything like “immediate action” or “claims” of direct legal threats.

Sora 2, OpenAI’s top-of-the-line text-to-video model, was released in late September, and was met with a mixture of surprise and annoyance by anyone interested in AI. Copyright hell is revealed immediately. That includes a great deal of content that looks a lot like Japanese media features pokemon, Hideo Kojima’s video game universeand some Unspecified Studio Ghibli production.

Framing the alleged infringement is different in tone and approach than most American copyright claims. Similarities between Sora 2 and Japanese images and videos are “the result of using Japanese content as machine learning data,” says CODA. When such content is output, “CODA considers that the act of copying during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement.”

There is a potentially relevant section on AI in Japan’s copyright law called Article 30-4 that may shed some light on CODA’s reasoning and reasons for starting with such a lenient approach to achieving remedies—namely that Japan is a permissive legal environment for this sort of thing. According to a Official fact sheets on the law“Exploitation for non-pleasure purposes” such as “AI development or other forms of data analysis may, in principle, be permitted without the permission of the copyright holder.”

CODA, however, states that in Japan, “prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no mechanism allowing the avoidance of liability for infringement through subsequent objections.”