Edition 97.

This week’s Spotlight: Seedance 2.0.

After cease-and-desists from Disney, Paramount Skydance, and many others this week, ByteDance has now promised safeguards for the tool - but with new tools popping up almost weekly, how can IP owners protect their works, whilst harnessing the creative energy of their audiences?

Plus Speed Reads of:

Let’s dive in ⤵️

Last week, Bytedance launched Seedance 2.0.

And as usually happens when these tools become available to the public (remember Sora 2’s launch?!), people began to create - and their default was to recreate their favourite characters and idols.

Within hours, our feeds were flooded with some of the most recognisable IP and talent doing things that would never receive approval from franchise management teams.

Studios and streamers (Disney, Paramount Skydance, WBD, Netflix etc), and unions like SAG-AFTRA, responded with cease-and-desists and statements condemning it.

And whilst Bytedance have now promised to put safeguards in place, Seedance is just one tool in a sea of models currently being built and released.

It’s the latter.

The reality is that with all of the investment going into AI, the tools are improving at a incredible rate of knots, and with every generation of AI model, production quality improves and so does the speed of creation.

The result of this is two-fold:

1) Talented storytellers now have tools to create faster than ever.

2) Everyone now has tools to create faster than ever.

And its that second point that will mean a deluge of content in our feeds. More visually impressive content than we’ve seen before, yes - but still hollow - lacking the soul, feeling and narrative depth that sustains the most beloved IP.

Either way - there will be a lot of it, and thus the threat is that discovery of your more carefully curated and produced content becomes exponentially harder for your fans to find.

However, this does open up the conversation around what the coming years will look like, and how important participation will become as a strategy to keep your IP culturally relevant.

Well, the crux of it is control of the conversation.

As Pete Basgen - VP at Livewire put it at SEG3 LA:

In other words, abstinence is no longer an option. Your IP will live inside these emerging platforms and tools regardless - officially licensed or not.

The real question then becomes whether you want to shape how it appears, or inherit the version that the community creates.

In general, no.

Many are still operating for a world where production/creation was scarce, and distribution was controlled. We’re definitively no longer in that era.

So, how can they evolve?

The biggest challenge is that the current model puts malicious infringements and fan-created content into the same bucket, and they’re dealt with in similar ways.

This is detrimental.

We now live in a world where fans want to participate, not just consume, and they now have all the tools they’ll need to be able to do so, with or without your permission. It would be naive to assume otherwise.

But this isn’t just an ideological shift for the sake of it - there’s a commercial upside, as allowing structured participation can be a hugely valuable thing for recognisable IP, as Jessica Jung, AI Innovation Lab Lead from Supercell, said at SEG3 LA this December:

And that’s the nuance many are missing; UGC content can, should and will be an amplifier for established IP, not a detractor.

This is because only IP with real cultural appeal, like from across sports, entertainment & gaming, have the fandom, depth and communities connected to them to be able to sustain participatory ecosystems.

So if you have a well-known IP, you’re in the privileged position where fans and creators want to dedicate time to building around you. If you lean into that intentionally, it can strengthen your flywheel rather than weaken your moat.

And that to some regard is the approach Disney recently took to their licensing deal with OpenAI. It’s the acceptance that generative tools aren’t going away - and being able to shape how your IP appears inside them may be more effective than simply reacting after the fact.

Deliberate infringement, as with Seedance 2.0, and unauthorised corporate use or model training without permission should be dealt with firmly. Creators and owners should be remunerated for their works.

But enforcement isn’t the problem - it’s the indiscriminate application of it that is.

In a world of saturation, your IP arguably becomes more valuable, not less. Audiences will continue to seek out emotion and feeling, and fan-driven industries have that in abundance.

At the same time, AI tools are going to become part of production workflows. It will be a sliding scale; some will use it everywhere possible, some will be more selective - but the economics and improvements in quality make it inevitable.

Similarly, with hundreds of millions now using GenAI tools on a daily basis, consumer expectations will grow that creation and participation should be things they can do around their passion points.

It means it’s vital to separate infringement from participation by:

More on this in Edition 63 from Graham Robinson of Yakoa.

As production costs fall and creation becomes frictionless, enforcement alone won’t help to sustain your IP and its cultural relevance. For that, you’ll need to show up in environments where creativity is taking place - even if that requires you to be more flexible than your current approach will allow.

And as I’m sure this won’t be the last time we’ll write about an AI tool that treads the line between innovation and infringement, I believe the long-term winners will be those that have a clear strategy, and can therefore distinguish (both internally and externally) between what deserves protection and enforcement, and what merits structured participation and flexibility.

We’re going deeper on remix culture, IP management, and the protection vs participation debate at SEG3 London this June 18-19.

See what you can be part of this summer ⤵️

GEEIQ have released their annual State of Brands report, with new research and insights from the leading developers, studios, brands and creators building in virtual worlds.

As budgets tighten, attention and performance matter more, which helps to explain why integrations took the crown in 2025.

Owned-experiences can still make sense for some, but standing out amongst 6m+ (and rising) experiences on Roblox is obviously challenging. And that’s just to get players there once - never mind two, three, four times etc.

So by focusing on integrations, brands and IP owners can concentrate on creative marketing, and how they can best enhance the story or experience with their presence, while native-creators and studios can do what they do best - build, maintain and grow fun games players want to return to regularly.

Boston Consulting Group released a thought-piece diving into how sports industry can reduce its reliance on media rights.

As the data shows, Tier 1 sports are somewhat insulated from this transition for the time-being, but for the rest, business model innovation is no longer a maybe, but a must.

Whilst media rights will remain a critical part of the equation, future growth will increasingly depend on how effectively teams build direct relationships, translate the newfound insight into personalised experiences, and use of that data to unlock new commercial opportunities.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!