MPA’s Rivkin slams Sora 2 copyright breaches
October 7, 2025
By Colin Mann
Charles Rivkin, Chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), has criticised OpenAI’s stance on copyright responsibility following the recent release of video production tool Sora 2.
“Since Sora 2’s release, videos that infringe our members’ films, shows, and characters have proliferated on OpenAI’s service and across social media,” he noted.
“While OpenAI clarified it will ‘soon’ offer rightsholders more control over character generation, they must acknowledge it remains their responsibility – not rightsholders’ – to prevent infringement on the Sora 2 service. OpenAI needs to take immediate and decisive action to address this issue. Well-established copyright law safeguards the rights of creators and applies here,” added Ridkin.
The MPA, whose members include Disney, Netflix, Paramount, Amazon MGM Studios, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery, has taken strong stance on piracy and shutting down illegal websites that stream movies and TV shows.
Open AI CEO Sam Altman has tried to conciliate with an update to rightsholders.
“First, we will give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters, similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls,” Altman wrote in the post titled ‘Sora Update #1’, adding: “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly.”
That change in thinking may have been prompted by the multiple legal salvos that the major studios have lobbed at Midjourney. And at least one major talent agency, WME, has informed OpenAI that all of its clients would be opting out of having their likenesses featured on the video tool.
“Our position is that artists should have a choice in how they show up in the world and how their likeness is used and we have notified OpenAI that all WME clients be opted out of the latest Sora AI update, regardless of whether IP rights holders have opted out of IP our clients are associated with,” commented WME’s digital chief Chris Jacquemin.
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