Disney's OpenAI Deal Could Be Turning Point In IP Licensing

Disney has long been among the most aggressive enforcers of film and character intellectual property.

For a company that has historically tried to squash new uses of its content, the December OpenAI Sora deal reads as an "if you can't beat them, join them" moment.

In that respect, its posture now resembles that of the major record labels during the early years of digital music distribution. The Sora deal appears to recall the point at which the music industry shifted from litigation-driven resistance to negotiated adoption through select services such as iTunes and later Spotify and other streaming platforms.

This analogy has its limits. In music, the first wave of digital disputes centered on obvious unauthorized copying and redistribution of finished tracks on peer-to-peer networks, which immediately undercut the core recorded music revenue model; in artificial intelligence, many of the early cases are aimed further upstream, at how models ingest and learn from