Do Not Mess with the Mouse, Google
December 15, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
“Google Removes AI Videos of Disney Characters After Cease and Desist Letter” made me visualize an image of Godzilla which I sometimes misspell as Googzilla frightened of a mouse; specifically, a quite angry Mickey. Why?
A mouse causes a fearsome creature to jump on the kitchen chair. Who knew a mouse could roar? Who knew the green beast would listen? Thanks, Qwen. Your mouse does not look like one of Disney’s characters. Good for you.
The write up says:
Google has removed dozens of AI-generated videos that depicted Disney-owned characters after receiving a cease and desist letter from the studio on Wednesday. Disney flagged the YouTube links to the videos in its letter, and demanded that Google remove them immediately.
What adds an interesting twist to this otherwise ho hum story about copyright viewed as an old-fashioned concept is that Walt Disney invested in OpenAI and worked out a deal for some OpenAI customers to output Disney-okayed images. (How this will work out at prompt wizards try to put Minnie, Snow White, and probably most of the seven dwarves in compromising situations I don’t know. (If I were 15 years old, I would probably experiment to find a way to generate an image involving Price Charming and the Lion King in a bus station facility violating one another and the law. But now? Nah, I don’t care what Disney, ChatGPT users, and AI do. Have at it.)
The write up says that Google said:
“We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them,” the company said. “More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built additional innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content.”
Yeah, how did that work out when YouTube TV subscribers lost access to some Disney content. Then, Google asked users who paid for content and did not get it to figure out how to sign up to get the refund. Yep, beneficial.
Something caused the Google to jump on a kitchen chair when the mouse said, “See you in court. Bring your checkbook.”
I thought Google was too big to obey any entity other than its own mental confections. I was wrong again. When will the EU find a mouse-type tactic?
Stephen E Arnold, December 15, 2025
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