association

CAPE TOWN: The head organizer of the 2010 World Cup was re-elected president of South Africa’s soccer federation on Saturday despite facing criminal charges over alleged fraud while in office.

Danny Jordaan, 75, beat challenger Sandile Zungu, a South African businessman and soccer club owner, by 157 votes to 82, according to an announcement by the South African Football Association. Jordaan has been head of SAFA since 2013 and will serve a fourth term.

Jordaan was a pivotal figure in bringing the World Cup to Africa for the first time in 2010 and his work was praised in helping make the tournament a success.

But he has been followed by controversy since then.

He came under scrutiny in 2015 over if he had knowledge of an alleged $10 million bribe made by South Africa to a FIFA official to help win the 2010 hosting rights. The allegation against unidentified South African bid officials was contained in an indictment by the US Department of Justice. South Africa denied the allegation.

Jordaan was accused in 2017 of rape by South African singer and political activist Jennifer Ferguson, who said the rape happened more than two decades earlier. Jordaan denied that allegation, and charges against him were dropped because of a lack of evidence.

Jordaan was arrested in 2024 and charged with fraud and theft for the alleged misuse of around $70,000 while SAFA president. He was accused alongside several others, including a former acting CEO of SAFA and the chief financial officer of SAFA.

The charges accuse Jordaan of using SAFA money to hire personal security and a PR company to enhance his public image in the wake of the Ferguson rape allegations.

The fraud case has been bogged down by delays and is yet to go to trial. Jordaan and his co-accused denied wrongdoing.

The buildup to Saturday’s SAFA election was also troubled, with the national association saying some voting officials had received death threats and others had been harassed and intimidated. SAFA said it would notify the police but didn’t say who was behind the threats.

The Motion Picture Assn. has struck its first agreement with an artificial intelligence company, saying Monday that ByteDance has strengthened copyright guardrails into its AI video and image tools that drew legal threats from every major Hollywood studio in February.

ByteDance, a Chinese company, is the former majority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations.

The MPA, the trade association that lobbies for major studios such as Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment, said it has had constructive engagement with ByteDance over the last several months to rein in Seedance, a text-to-video generation tool, and Seedream, which produces images using text commands.

“Today’s agreement illustrates our belief that copyright is a cornerstone of the film and television industry – and reinforces our commitment to protect creative content,” said MPA Chairman and Chief Executive Charles Rivkin.

MPA declined to share the specific guardrails in the agreement.

The agreement comes as some studios have expressed concerns about AI models training on their copyrighted material without permission or compensation. In February, MPA issued a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, alleging Seedance 2.0 was trained on copyrighted material and generating unauthorized videos featuring characters such as “SpongeBob SquarePants” and visuals replicating a scene from sci-fi series “Stranger Things” without studios’ permission. It was the first time the MPA had filed a cease-and-desist letter to a major AI firm.

“ByteDance is engaged in pervasive and widespread infringement of our members’ valuable intellectual property that it must stop immediately,” MPA’s global general counsel Karyn Temple wrote in a Feb. 20 letter to ByteDance’s global general counsel John Rogovin.

ByteDance in response said it was taking steps to strengthen its safeguards to prevent unauthorized use of IP or likeness.

Since then, ByteDance has released Seedream 5.0 Pro and Seedance 2.5, which reflect “ByteDance’s continued advances in IP protections,” the tech company and MPA said in a news release.

“ByteDance respects the intellectual property rights that underpin creative industries around the world, and we believe responsible innovation in AI goes hand in hand with meaningful protections for rightsholders,” ByteDance’s Rogovin said in the statement.

Seedance has emerged as a leader in AI tools among some indie filmmakers, who say it is more cost-effective than other options. AI tech companies are eager to find ways to partner with studios to make their tools better, but are also facing competition from rivals to gain more customers as quickly as possible. That has caused some companies to quickly launch their AI products without first putting in more mechanisms to prevent images from appearing without copyright holders’ permission.