YouTube, which has its headquarters in San Bruno and is owned by Google, deleted the Screen Culture and KH Studio accounts on Thursday, December 18. Together, the channels generated over 1 billion views and had over 2 million subscribers. A 404 page with the message “This page isn’t available. Sorry about that.”
YouTube said that the channels had broken its spam and deceptive metadata regulations, despite being believed to have generated millions of dollars for their businesses.
The action was taken one week after the Walt Disney Co. sent Google an ultimatum alleging that the Menlo Park tech company’s AI training algorithms and services violate its copyrights on a “massive scale.”
Disney and OpenAI signed a three-year licensing agreement that same week, enabling the San Francisco AI research and deployment company’s Sora platform to produce brief, request-driven social videos with over 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and “Star Wars” characters, including Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader.
Screen Culture, an Indian company, specializes in repurposing existing promotional materials to create fan-pleasing trailers. One example is the “Superman” version, which used AI enhancement and editing to distort sequences from the James Gunn movie.
23 trailers for Marvel Studios’ “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” which will be released in theaters by Disney in July, were among the others in line of forgery. Some of the promotional films placed higher in YouTube search results than the official trailer, leading many people to believe they were genuine.
According to Deadline, Georgia-based KH Studio produced entirely made-up trailers, envisioning a “Squid Game” season featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and a James Bond film starring Henry Cavill and Margot Robbie.
Due to copyright concerns, YouTube disabled both companies’ ad income possibilities in March. However, they were able to resume their commercialization operations after they agreed to label their films as “fan trailer,” “parody,” or “concept trailer.” But in recent months, the labeling vanished from both channels.
