Midnight Labs, an AI company focused on intellectual property protection in the entertainment industry, has secured an investment from Sony’s Innovation Fund to help bolster its efforts to combat piracy and deepfakes plaguing entertainment companies and content creators in the U.S. and Japan.
A Midnight Labs spokesperson did not disclose how much the company had received. A source familiar with the matter told Variety the total was a seven-figure sum and that Sony will take on an advisory role. The company — which is based in Dublin, Tokyo and San Francisco — says its automated enforcement tools have removed more than 2.8 billion pieces of infringement content, including those that’ve been generated by AI, and focuses on pirated films, leaked music, manga and deepfakes mimicking celebrities and executives.
“Generative AI has industrialized piracy, exposing IP holders to both financial loss and real-time reputational damage,” Dan Purcell, Midnight Labs’ founder and CEO, said in a statement. “A single deepfake of a CEO, created in seconds and distributed across thousands of sites, can cause immediate, catastrophic harm before a legal team can even open a ticket.”
According to Purcell, traditional digital rights management approaches “simply cannot keep pace with AI-generated infringement, leaving legal and content protection teams overwhelmed.” He claims Midnight Labs makes enforcement autonomous “by scanning, detecting, proving and removing stolen content faster than it can spread, returning control to IP holders over their content, reputation and revenue. The backing of Sony Innovation Fund accelerates that mission.”
Copyright infringement and intellectual property violations have become a focal point in the rise of generative AI, with media and entertainment companies either suing AI companies over alleged violations (for example, the Disney-Universal-Warner Bros. lawsuits against Midjourney) or striking licensing deals to help train large language models (say, OpenAI’s short-lived deal with Disney).
“Midnight Labs is tackling an important and increasingly complex problem for the creative industries,” Sony Ventures EMEA managing director Antonio Avitabile said in a statement. “We are pleased to support the team and look forward to collaborating as they build solutions for rights holders worldwide.”
Midnight Labs’ creator-focused product Ceartas also aims to help creators and their brands safeguard their names, voices and likenesses. The company’s products scan more than 75 million sources in its bid to find IP violations, including the dark web, and use AI to produce documentation for IP holders for legal cases to secure their work.
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