OpenAI Launches Sora: AI Video App Raises Copyright Questions

New AI-generated Video Generator enters the competitive market

Sora, an artificial intelligence video-generating application, has been publicly launched by OpenAI, and allows users to create and share AI-generated videos via social media-like content feeds. The release poses meaningful questions regarding copyright protection and ownership of the content in the fast-developing AI video generation realm.

The Sora App How the Sora App Generates AI Videos of Copyrighted Content

The Sora application enables users to create up to ten seconds long videos with the help of AI. The feature that sets this platform apart regarding the traditional video creation tools is its ability to create content, which can potentially use copyrighted content. The company officials say the approach resembles the current policy framework operated by OpenAI in generating AI images, with the burden of copyright owners to actively opt out of it should they not wish to see their content displayed in the video feed.

This opt-out model is an innovation to the old copyrighted protection systems when the content creators usually have default control of their intellectual property. The policy enforces proactive measures on television studios, film production companies and other copyright owners to ensure that their content does not feature in the content generation capability of the platform.

Hollywood and Entertainment Industry Copyright Policy Concerns

This is because the copyright strategy that OpenAI has used on their AI video application has also raised eyebrows across the entertainment sector. The company representatives asserted that they have been holding consultations with a number of copyright holders over the past few weeks concerning matters related to the implementation of the policy. Sources close to the situation report that Disney, one of the largest media corporations in the world, has already used its right to decline this feature of having their copyrighted content be used in the application.

In early 2021, OpenAI called on the Trump administration to acknowledge that the act of training AI models with copyrighted material amounts to a fair use under the copyright law. In March, the company had claimed that any fair use doctrine applied to the development of artificial intelligence would deal with not only American competitiveness, but also national security. OpenAI opined that the absence of this kind of legal interpretation would mean that the United States AI companies would lose competitive advantages against international competitors, especially in China.

Cameo Protection Measures- Feature and Public Figure

In a move to curb the privacy and unauthorized likeness issues, OpenAI established some privacy measures in the Sora application to avoid users creating AI videos of public figures or other users without their direct consent. The platform has included a system of the liveness check verification whereby user is required to move their heads in different directions as they recite randomly generated sequences of numbers.

The app also has a feature known as Cameo that allows users to create lifelike AI portraits of themselves and use them as digital versions in AI-created scenes. Users need to post their own AI-generated video and give consent before permission can be granted to use their likeness in the generation of content. The system also enables one to preview drafts of videos which contain his/her likeness before it is actually published.

Competition to the well-known social media sites

The fact that Sora app is a new application that directly competes with established digital content and social media platforms is seen as a competitor by industry analysts. In a note about this sector, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak described firms here as fighting to capture user attention and be able to influence consumer behavior patterns. In their research note, he found that Meta, Google, TikTok, and other companies were confronting new competition with the AI-based video-generating application from OpenAI.

The introduction of Sora marks an OpenAI move out of text-based AI products such as ChatGPT and into the visual content creation sector. With AI video creation technology becoming more affordable, the issues of copyright protection, the authenticity of the content, and the ownership of creative works are bound to keep spawning controversy among the content creators, technology corporations, and law practitioners.

The reaction of the entertainment industry to this copyright policy, together with the alterations in the regulatory area in the area of fair use and AI training data, will influence the functioning of AI video applications under the current system of the intellectual property protection. With the technological innovation, stakeholders in the creative industries have to balance the two aspects of innovation and original content creation protection.