OpenAI's New Sora Video Generator to Require Copyright Holders to Opt Out (www.wsj.com)

OpenAI plans to roll out a new version of its Sora generative-video system that will by default be able to produce videos containing copyrighted characters, performances and other protected material unless copyright holders explicitly opt out, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has been notifying talent agencies and studios about the forthcoming release and the opt‑out process over the past week, and expects to launch the update in the coming days. The move is significant because it flips the usual permission dynamic: rights holders must take proactive steps to exclude their work rather than giving permission for use. For the AI/ML community this raises immediate technical and policy questions about dataset curation, rights enforcement and filter efficacy — an opt‑out system implies reliance on blocklists, metadata or detection filters that can be incomplete or error‑prone. It also heightens legal and ethical scrutiny around synthesized likenesses, consumer-facing deepfakes, and downstream moderation burdens for platforms embedding or hosting generated video. How well OpenAI implements the opt‑out mechanism and detection controls will affect abuse risk, creator compensation debates, and potentially set an industry precedent for how generative models handle copyrighted content.