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Hollywood gets tough with ByteDance over copyright infringement.
It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service.
I'm Gideon Long plus.
Cuba's fuel crisis deepens an airport strike in Kenya and Dave Stewart, one half of British 80s pop duo The Eurythmics, tells the BBC about his new business venture.
Hollywood has locked horns with ByteDance over copyright issues.
Disney and other US entertainment companies accuse the Chinese tech firm of stealing their intellectual property by training its new AI tool Seadance on Disney characters and images of real-life actors.
ByteDance launched Seadance just last week, and people have used it to make incredibly realistic videos, some of which include
AI-generated versions of real actors and Disney characters.
ByteDance says it will address the industry's concerns.
I spoke to Duncan Clark, a tech investor and advisor who's currently in Beijing, about what might happen next.
Certainly we know that Disney will not backtrack because its entire business model is based on the IP that it's built up over century or so.
But for ByteDance and for AI companies in general, they're in a big rush to popularize their apps.
And so frankly, even having transgression like this, even if it lasts for a few weeks and then is pulled back, is actually helpful to these AI companies to gain popularity in a very competitive market.
We've seen this with Grok, with illicit images.
There's lots of issues now between AI clashing with traditional media models and intellectual property.
But this one is pretty high profile given the companies involved and the timing around the Spring Festival here in China.
And I wanted to ask you about another Chinese AI-related development which is also timed around the Spring Festival.
This is to do with the Chinese e-commerce retailer Alibaba, a company you know well.
You've written about extensively.
And it's launched this new AI app called Qualcomm.
And it did so to coincide with the Chinese New Year, because that's when a lot of Chinese spend a lot of money.
And in its first week since Alibaba launched its Lunar New Year campaign, Quen was used to place 120 million shopping orders.
Can you explain what Quen is, how it works?
The idea is that you don't have to really go through the process of searching through different options.
You just communicate.
So basically, chat becomes the way you order.
So if you just, you know, get me a milk tea.
Yeah.
And it's done.
You know, payments already there.
And I think, particularly right now.
The other reason, if consumers want to bargain or they want subsidies or free tea in this case, because it literally is a subsidy of several hundred million dollars are being poured into this because the competition right now is so intense between what we call the new BAT, which is ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, plus other companies like DeepSeek and Baidu.
They're all trying to become, you know, the leader in AI in China.
The Lunate New Year is upon us.
Just spell out how important it is for the Chinese retail sector.
It's like the US, the Super Bowl, Black Friday.
I mean, it is the, particularly in tech, it is the moment.
I mean think about a year ago actually, the Chinese company DeepSeek sort of shocked not only China but the world with the advances it's had.
And that was very much linked to Chinese New Year.
Similarly, I think Chinese New Year in general is when consumers expect to be thought over more.
And of course, there's a big tradition in China of giving gifts, cash in the past.
And now you can gift all kinds of digital products and access discounts and coupons.
And so AI is merging with this traditional Chinese holiday.
But I think in the end of the day, China is showing that it can really pull ahead of the US in the dispersion of technology.
Even if we think about the US, you know leading models that are coming out.
China's catching up there.
But in terms of making it part of everybody's life, as you said, like you think something, you chat something and then you get it.
It's showing the future for the world, perhaps, of where we're heading.
Tech expert Duncan Clark.
Now to Cuba.
Welcome to the 25th annual Festival de Havana, a true celebration of Cuban cigars and Cuban culture.
The launch there of last year's Festival de Habano, the most important cigar festival in the Cuban calendar.
It brings cigar aficionados to Cuba from across the world, generating precious income for the Caribbean nation.
But not this year.
The festival has been cancelled due to Cuba's fuel crisis.
The US has tightened its blockade on Cuba and has prevented oil reaching the island from Cuba's ally, Venezuela.
It's all part of a seemingly eternal feud between Washington and Havana.
The BBC's Will Grant explains what's happening.
Ever since the US economic embargo was imposed on Cuba some 65 years ago, the policy goal by Washington has been broadly the same towards the communist-run island regime change.
And President Trump, in his second administration, appears to be going for all-out regime change, accompanied by the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, of course, a Cuban-American himself, in whose very political DNA is the idea of changing the governments of both Venezuela and Havana to ones that are more in line with Washington.
Will Grant reporting.
To Kenya now, where a strike by aviation workers is causing disruption at airports across the country, including at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport, one of Africa's busiest transport hubs.
Some flights have been delayed for hours.
Workers are striking for more pay, even though a court blocked the threatened action last week.
Kenya's civil aviation authority says it's talking to trade unions to try to resolve the issues.
Let's look at the Japanese economy now because it had growth data out today and it wasn't pretty.
0.1% growth in the fourth quarter, 0.2% for the year, lower than economists had expected.
I'm joined by Jane Sydenham, Investment Director at Rathbones Investment Management.
Jane, not very positive.
No, no.
So growth is certainly still pretty disappointing.
And this is the challenge for the new prime minister.
She's been voted in with a two-thirds majority in the lower house.
She's got all of the levers at her disposal.
She really needs to get the Japanese economy growing.
There was a stimulus package announced in November which doesn't really seem to have had that much effect on sentiment so far.
But there are subsidies for energy, there are cash handouts, investment incentives in semiconductors and so on.
Defence spending.
But investors are worried about all of this stimulus because Japan has huge amounts of debt, twice the size of the economy, so much higher than most Western economies.
And the worry is, you know, is this too much stimulus going to cause, strength in the Japanese currency, weakness in the US dollar?
You know, how's this all going to work?
But her challenge is to get that growth going.
And also defence stocks up today.
Why is that?
So we've got the Munich Security Conference going on.
I think it's a timely reminder that Europe's got to take care of its own defence.
Germany's announced 600 billion euros of spending on defence over the next five years.
Most of the countries in Europe are also increasing their spending.
That's all going to be good for these companies.
Jane from Rathbones, thanks for joining us.
Now, Eurythmics were one of the big bands of the 1980s.
Singer Annie Lennox and musician and producer Dave Stewart sold around 75 million records.
But since then, of course, the music industry has changed beyond recognition.
Now Dave Stewart has launched a business venture called Rare Entity, which aims to put emerging talent centre stage and protect the intellectual property of artists from the threat of AI.
He's been speaking to the BBC's Mark Labelle.
I didn't listen to music at all.
I wasn't interested till I was about 14.
When we started Eurythmics we didn't have any money or anything, but I knew that we needed some equipment to try and make a record ourselves, and it was a bank manager that lent us £5000.
Obviously Annie was a bit nervous, but I explained if we could get this equipment, we could make our album and then we could make another album without buying more equipment.
And, of course, he lent us that money and we made Sweet Dreams.
AI is everywhere.
So before it would be giant corporations, or still now, and they've got all this investors and money, and then they're looking for the latest TikTok star or whatever.
And we're the other way around.
So we see the creatives and the IP at the top layer and then look at it and go well, that's an amazing concept or thing.
Let's try and build that and put it together with the layer below.
You're spotting twinkles in somebody's eye.
You're getting them into your orbit, incubating them and giving them a business backbone to survive the world as is, not the world as you and Annie had it.
Exactly.
That's the end chord.
That's the end chord for this edition of World Misses Express 2.
I'm Gideon Long.
Thanks for listening.
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