Tag: disney

Disney Sends Cease-and-Desist Letter to Chinese ByteDance To Stop Use of Copyrighted Characters in New Seedance 2.0 AI Video Generator

ByteDance reportedly is vowing to comply.

The release of the revolutionary Seedance 2.0 AI video generator has sent Hollywood into a frenzy, with the Motion Picture Association and several class organizations firing on all cylinders against the Chinese company ByteDance.

Now, Disney has gone one step further and sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing it of ‘using Disney characters to train and power the AI generator without permission’.

Reuters reported:

“Disney said ByteDance had pre‑packaged Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as if they were public-domain clip art, the person said.

The letter alleges Seedance is reproducing, distributing and creating derivative works featuring Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and other characters, the person added.”

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The ultra-secret Disney ranch bought by Walt himself that entertainment giant doesn’t want fans to know about

Hidden in the hills of California sits a 708-acre ranch that the Disney company tries to keep secret from devoted fans who want to peek behind its gates.

The Gold Oak ranch in Placerita Canyon is used as a film set and testing ground for amusement park rides, just about 25 miles north of the company’s largest studio in Burbank.

Unlike the Disney Burbank Studio, the Gold Oak ranch is completely off-limits, lined with no trespassing signs to keep the company’s future plans secret.

‘They go out of their way to limit access because once you open the door, the floodgates just would be unleashed by all the Disney fans,’ Bill Cotter, a former Disney employee, told SFGATE.

The ranch is closely guarded to keep filming hidden, and plans for future rides private, noted the outlet.

While access is off-limits to the public, diehard fans have likely seen inside the mysterious ranch while watching projects such as The Apple Dumpling Gang, The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit, Follow Me, Boys!, and The Parent Trap.

Walt Disney purchased the studio, which was only 315 acres, in 1959 for just $300,000 after spending time there while filming the Spin and Marty serials, the SF Gate noted.

‘The rugged canyons and oak-lined meadows, as well as its proximity to the Studio in Burbank, made the Golden Oak Ranch the perfect place to film Walt’s increasing slate of film and television productions,’ according to the Walt Disney Family Museum.

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Man Charged Over Threats Ahead of Vance Disneyland Visit

A 22-year-old man from Anaheim, California, is facing federal charges after allegedly falsely claiming he placed pipe bombs inside Disneyland before Vice President JD Vance visited the park with his family last year.

Marco Antonio Aguayo is accused of posting messages on the Walt Disney Co.’s official Instagram page after learning that Vance was visiting the park on July 12, according to the criminal complaint. He was charged Wednesday with one count of making threats against the president and successors to the presidency, the Department of Justice said in a news release.

Aguayo is expected to make his initial appearance Tuesday at U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California. If convicted, Aguayo faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison.

Aguayo “is now in the Unhappiest Place on Earth,” Bill Essayli, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, wrote Friday night on X. “Today, Aguayo was arrested and charged with threatening to kill @VP Vance with pipe bombs last summer when the Vice President and his family visited Disneyland.

“A threat to kill a public official is a federal crime. First Amendment rights do not extend to threats to kill or injure others, especially our nation’s elected officials. Such conduct will not be tolerated and will not go unpunished.”

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HORROR: Dead Body Found at Disney World is SIXTH ONE in Just Three Months

Something very sinister is happening at the supposed happiest place on Earth.

A dead body was just discovered at Disney World and it’s the sixth one in just three months. It’s an obvious public relations disaster for Disney but it also raises all kinds of questions.

What are the odds of so many people turning up dead in one place, even if the deaths are unrelated?

Breitbart News reports:

Sixth Dead Body Found at Disney World in Less than Three Months

A sixth person has died at Disney World in less than three months. The body was found just one day after New Year’s Day, with the discovery coming after a series of deaths that have rocked the “Most Magical Place on Earth.”

Police say the body was found around 9:00 p.m. on Friday night in Disney Springs, a shopping center on the Walt Disney World property in Florida, according to a report by WKMG.

“Deputies responded to the Disney Springs Orange Garage on East Buena Vista Drive and discovered a man who was deceased,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Office told the outlet on Saturday.

“This incident is being investigated as a possible suicide,” the sheriff’s office added. “We have no additional information to release and will have no further updates this weekend.”

While Friday’s Disney World dead body discovery was the first of 2026, it is the sixth death to have happened at the amusement park since October.

The New York Post has details on the other deaths:

The death was the first at Disney World of the new year, but was just the sixth to happen there since October.

First, 31-year-old Disney superfan Sumer Equitz was found dead on Oct. 14 from an apparent suicide at Disney World’s Contemporary Resort.

Then on Oct. 21, a man in his 60s was found dead on a Disney World trail from a pre-existing medical condition at Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort & Campground.

And just two days later on Oct. 23, 28-year-old Matthew Alec Cohn died after jumping the 12th floor of a Disney Hotel.

A woman in her 40s was then found dead at Disney’s Pop Century Resort on Nov. 2, while on Nov. 8 a body was found at Disney’s Saratoga Springs Resort & Spa in Lake Buena Vista.

If you’re having any serious health issues, you may want to avoid Disney properties for the near future. Perhaps a Six Flags park would be a safer bet.

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Disney to Pay $10 Million Penalty for Alleged Illegal Targeting of Children

It turns out even Disney’s “magic” has legal — and costly — limits.

The Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs announced in a news release Tuesday that it has reached a settlement with the entertainment giant over alleged violations of federal children’s privacy law.

Under an order entered by a federal court, Disney Worldwide Services Inc. and Disney Entertainment Operations LLC — collectively referred to as “Disney” — will pay $10 million in civil penalties.

The settlement stems from allegations that Disney violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, commonly known as COPPA.

According to the Justice Department, the violations involved Disney’s handling of data connected to popular video content that’s distributed on YouTube and widely viewed by children.

A complaint filed in a California federal court by the DOJ alleged that Disney failed to properly designate certain YouTube videos as content directed at children, the news release states.

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Report: U.S. Is the World’s Largest Debtor to China — Thanks to Amazon, Disney, and Tesla

A report published on Tuesday by the AidData research lab at William & Mary university in Williamsburg, Virginia, found that the United States is the largest recipient of loans from China.

The report, entitled Chasing China: Learning to Play by Beijing’s Global Lending Rules, found that 1,193 Chinese banks, investment companies, and government institutions loaned $2.2 trillion to recipients in 179 countries between 2000 and 2023.

AidData researchers drew two surprising conclusions from their research: “China’s overseas lending portfolio is vastly larger than previously understood,” and its loans to the developed world are an order of magnitude larger than widely believed.

The common image of Chinese loans is banks pumping huge loans to Third World countries through China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The ostensible purpose of BRI was to help developing countries build vital infrastructure, but the projects are often criticized as unprofitable “debt traps” approved by spendthrift local governments that saddle the borrowing nations with debts to Beijing they can never repay.

Whatever the flaws of BRI might be, AidData determined that only about 20 percent of China’s titanic lending portfolio involves infrastructure projects in developing nations. Meanwhile, the amount China loans to developed nations “skyrocketed from 12% to 76%” between 2000 and 2023. Ten of the top 20 destinations for Chinese loans are “high-income” countries.

“Another major discovery is that Chinese state-owned creditors have bankrolled approximately 10,000 projects and activities in 72 high-income countries to the tune of nearly $1 trillion,” the report said.

“Much of the lending to wealthy countries is focused on critical infrastructure, critical minerals, and the acquisition of high-tech assets like semiconductor companies,” noted AidData’s lead author, Brad Parks.

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Director of Disney’s private Caribbean island, 65, charged with raping American woman, 29, on the beach

The director of Disney’s Castaway Cay private cruise ship island in the Bahamas has been charged with raping an American woman on a beach, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal. 

Gursel Sahibas, 65, is accused of indecently assaulting the 29-year-old victim when they went for a swim at the shipwreck-themed resort.

Sources say the woman repeatedly begged him to stop but it has been claimed that married Sahinbas continued to grope her while they were in the ocean.

She returned to her native Florida following the alleged attack on September 22, but reported it to Bahamian officials based in the US one week later.

Her written complaint was passed to the Royal Bahamas Police Force and Sahinbas was arrested by cops from Great Abaco, the nearest island to 1,000-acre Castaway Cay.

The accused appeared in a Nassau court Thursday morning on rape and indecent assault charges where he was granted $15,000 cash bail and ordered not to contact the victim.

His attorney Tamika Roberts said Sahinbas was a British national who wanted to return to his home in Liverpool, northwest England.

Judge Petra Hanna agreed but said he must come back to the Bahamas for a January 21 hearing.

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Sen. Chuck Schumer Says Jimmy Kimmel Must Stay on Air to Save Democracy — Then Urges Him to Sue Disney

Senator Chuck Schumer has warned that Jimmy Kimmel must remain on air to protect American democracy.

Disney confirmed on Wednesday night that Kimmel’s show will be suspended indefinitely after comments he made about last week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk at the hands of a disturbed left-wing student.

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them — and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel remarked during Monday night’s show.

“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” said Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar’s broadcasting division, in a statement on Wednesday.

Schumer, who is currently America’s most powerful elected Democrat, is urging Kimmel to take the matter to court.

“America is meant to be a bastion of free speech,” Schumer wrote on the X platform. “Everybody across the political spectrum should be speaking out to stop what’s happening to Jimmy Kimmel.”

“This is about protecting democracy,” he continued. “This must go to court.”

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British man charged over mock Disneyland wedding to child had been investigated by BBC

The British paedophile charged in connection with organising a “mock wedding” to a child in Disneyland Paris is Jacky Jhaj, who was found guilty of sexual activity with two 15-year-olds in 2016, the BBC understands.

Jhaj, 39, has been charged in connection with organising the fake ceremony on Saturday, in which a nine-year-old Ukrainian girl was due to feature as his bride.

He was arrested when police were called on Saturday morning by an actor who said he had been hired by Jhaj to play the father of the bride.

The BBC has previously investigated how Jhaj was able to hire hundreds of children to act as his fawning fans at a fake film premiere in London’s Leicester Square in 2023.

Some of the children, who had been hired from casting agencies, were as young as six.

Teenage girls told the BBC that they had been asked to scream for him and try to touch him, without being told his real identity by the agencies.

Then in June last year, Jhaj was seen giving gifts to children outside dance auditions for another production – he was recognised by a parent who had seen the BBC article.

Two months later, and following the BBC’s further investigation, Jhaj was filmed posing naked in front of a mocked-up BBC News lorry in London which had been set on fire.

For the mock wedding at Disneyland Paris, which was to be filmed by Jhaj’s team, around 100 French extras had been recruited to take part.

The BBC understands that he appeared in front of a judge in Meaux, north-east of Paris, on Monday and was charged with fraud, breach of trust, money laundering, and identity theft and placed in pretrial detention.

Preliminary findings also stated that he had allegedly been “made-up professionally so that his face appeared totally different from his own”, according to the French prosecutor.

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Disney Refuses To Say If Man Who Posted Photos Of Women In Park Bathroom Will Be Banned

Aman dressed as a woman paraded photos of himself in 10 women’s bathrooms in Florida’s Disney World in a Tuesday Instagram post. The photos posted showed him ranking the different bathrooms on a scale of one to 10 and included other women in the background of the photos.

The man, going by the name Lilly Contino, thanked Disney for allowing him to use the women’s bathrooms, saying in his post, “Shoutout to @disneyparks for creating a safe space in the hellscape that is Florida.”

Despite the concern on the post’s comment section and on X, Disney has not taken any action to keep Contino out of the parks. When The Federalist reached out to Disney for comment, they did not respond. 

Under Florida Statute title XLVI Chapter 810 section 145, “for the amusement, entertainment…” it is a felony for anyone who “intentionally uses or intentionally installs an imaging device to secretly view, broadcast, or record a person without that person’s knowledge and consent who is dressing, undressing, or privately exposing the body, at a place and time when that person has a reasonable expectation of privacy.” 

Although Contino did not seemingly take photos of any private parts, he did take photos for entertainment reasons with women using the restroom in the background who would reasonably expect some privacy at Disney World. 

This isn’t the first time Contino has shared what some people would deem as private information to the public. The 32-year-old man posts content on Instagram about being a “trans girl on a mission”. His mission includes educating viewers on his transition process like Facial Feminization Surgery (FFS), a surgery that alters a face through sawing down the jaw bone, cutting the scalp to move the hairline lower, shaving the bone above the eye socket, and shaving down the Adam’s apple. His mission also includes taking photos in women’s bathrooms.

Despite Disney having “gender-neutral restrooms” called “companion restrooms,” Contino went into the women’s restrooms. Contino also said in a post documenting the experience that he “peed standing up,” an obvious sign that he’s probably in the wrong restroom. 

He continued to post about his “trans girl mission” in a video of him being “misgendered” at a Disney restaurant. He told the server he didn’t want the food he ordered anymore because the server said “yes sir” to him. 

Despite the server’s apology, Contino said “I don’t feel safe anymore.”

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