"The Strongest Legal Department" strikes back, Google Gemini has now started refusing to generate Disney characters

IT House, February 11 — Last December, Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google, accusing its AI products of casually outputting Disney’s intellectual property content like a “virtual vending machine.”

Nearly two months later, foreign media Deadline reported on February 9 that Google’s Gemini and Nano Banana tools have begun refusing generation requests involving Disney characters.

In January of this year, the media tested prompts that generated multiple Disney characters and successfully produced high-quality images.

To date, the same prompts have been blocked by Google. The system displays the message: “Due to concerns from third-party content providers, I am temporarily unable to generate this image. Please modify the prompt and try again.” However, if users upload photos of Disney characters and combine them with text prompts, Google’s AI products can still generate related IP content.

In December last year, Disney’s external lawyer, David Singer, stated in a 32-page cease and desist letter that tools like Veo, Nano Banana, and Gemini “are infringing Disney’s copyrights on a large scale.” The letter included images showing how simple prompts could generate detailed renderings of characters like Darth Vader and Iron Man.

Disney made four requests, including an immediate halt to infringement and stopping the use of Disney IP for model training. The letter noted that Disney had repeatedly expressed concerns but saw no improvements.

After the letter was made public, a Google spokesperson said, “We have a long-standing mutually beneficial relationship with Disney and will continue to communicate. We train AI using publicly available data from the open web and have introduced copyright control mechanisms such as Google-extended and YouTube Content ID, which give websites and copyright holders the rights to manage content.”

Notably, Disney nearly simultaneously announced a $1 billion agreement (IT House notes: approximately 6.919 billion RMB at current exchange rates) with OpenAI, licensing its characters to the generative video application Sora.