Colleen Cabili , Quarz; Shein accuses Temu of copyright infringement on 'industrial scale'
"Shein accused rival Temu of copyright infringement "on an industrial scale" as a two-week trial opened Monday at London's High Court, with Temu firing back that the lawsuit was designed to stifle competition rather than protect intellectual property."
Erica Thomas , 1819 News; Author of Alabama police officer training claims copyright infringement by U.S. Army
"An Alabama man filed a copyright infringement claim after he said his life’s work was stolen by the U.S. Army.
SSGT Vanguard’s Johnny Lee Smith wrote the training for police certifications in Alabama. The training is mandated by the Alabama Peace Officers’ Standards & Training Commission (APOSTC). The 40-hour flagship training defense tactics program has been used in Alabama since 2014.
Smith alleges the U.S. Army Civilian Police Academy in Leonard Wood, Mo., “unlawfully appropriated, reproduced, distributed and used derivative content” from the Defense Tactics Instructor Guide that he wrote. He said the Army’s new manual was developed after Army personnel attended his training."
Gene Maddaus, Variety; Netflix Prevails in ‘Tiger King’ Copyright Case, a Win for ‘Fair Use’ in Documentaries
"Documentary filmmakers who use unlicensed video clips can breathe a little easier, after an appellate panel reversed itself Thursday in a closely watched copyright case involving Netflix‘s “Tiger King” series.
A three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the filmmakers’ use of a 66-second clip from a character’s funeral was sufficiently transformative to qualify for “fair use” protection."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; Netflix fends off 'Tiger King' copyright claims again on appeal
"A U.S. appeals court ruled for Netflix on Thursday in a cameraman's copyright infringement case against the streaming video company over footage used in its hit 2020 documentary series "Tiger King."
The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Netflix made fair use of one of Timothy Sepi's videos and affirmed its previous ruling that the company did not violate Sepi's rights in seven others."
Ed Nawotka , Publishers Weekly; Chicken Soup for the Soul Sues AI Firms for Copyright Infringement
"Chicken Soup for the Soul is suing tech companies OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, Perplexity, Apple, and Nvidia for copyright infringement. The suit, filed March 17 in the Northern District of California, alleges that hundreds of its copyrighted works were ingested without authorization or compensation to train large language models...
Much like the complaint filed in December by author John Carreyrou and others against many of the same defendants, this filing also aims to challenge the class-action model that has dominated AI copyright litigation.
Pointing to the pending Anthropic settlement in the Northern District of California, the suit notes that the framework would pay rights holders approximately $3,000 per work—"just 2% of the Copyright Act's statutory ceiling of $150,000 per willfully infringed work." The complaint states that such settlements "seem to serve Defendants, not creators."
Chicken Soup for the Soul is instead seeking individualized statutory damages determined by a jury. The law firms behind the suit say more than 1,000 authors representing more than 5,000 works have signed on to the same approach."
Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch; The dictionary sues OpenAI
"Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging in its complaint that the AI giant has committed “massive copyright infringement.”
Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster, retains the copyright to nearly 100,000 online articles, which have been scraped and used to train OpenAI’s LLMs without permission, the publisher alleges in the lawsuit.
Britannica also accuses OpenAI of violating copyright laws when it generates outputs that contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions” of its content and when the AI lab uses its articles in ChatGPT’s RAG (retrieval augmented generation) workflow. OpenAI’s RAG tool is how the LLM scans the web or other databases for newly updated information when responding to a query. Britannica also alleges that OpenAI violates the Lanham Act, a trademark statute, when it generates made-up hallucinations and attributes them falsely to the publisher."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; YouTuber sues Runway AI in latest copyright class action over AI training
"Artificial intelligence video startup Runway AI has been hit with a proposed class action lawsuit in California federal court for allegedly misusing YouTube content to train its video generation platform.
YouTube creator David Gardner said in the complaint filed in Los Angeles on Monday, that Runway bypassed YouTube's copyright protections to illegally download user videos for its AI training."
Alyssa Aquino , Law.com; ‘Pirated’?: NY Defenders Face Copyright Suit for Allegedly ‘Copying’ Expert Report
"A researcher in their complaint alleged that the Federal Defenders of New York copied an expert report commissioned by other attorneys directly into court filings for their own case. “When you’re using something in litigation, you usually have a fair use defense, but that’s usually because you’re using it for something different than its original purpose,” said Stacey Lantagne, a law professor at Suffolk University. “But here, [the report] seems to have been created solely for litigation.”"
The Editorial Board, The Wall Street Journal; Copyright Piracy at the Supreme Court" In Cox v. Sony, is an internet provider liable for digital thieves?
Ronald Mann , SCOTUSblog; Court to consider billion-dollar judgment for copyright infringement
"The court will hear its big copyright case for the year during the first week of the December session, when on Monday, Dec. 1, it reviews a billion-dollar ruling against Cox Communications based on its failure to eradicate copyright infringement by its customers."
Nathan Wilk , Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB); White Bird Clinic sues Willamette Valley Crisis Care over misuse of trade secrets, copyright infringement
"Eugene’s White Bird Clinic is suing a rival nonprofit, Willamette Valley Crisis Care, over copyright infringement and the stealing of trade secrets.
WVCC was founded after White Bird shuttered CAHOOTS services in Eugene in April. The new nonprofit hopes to launch a similar mobile crisis intervention program and has multiple former CAHOOTS staff members on board.
White Bird is now alleging that minutes before WVCC co-founder Alese “Dandy” Colehour sent a resignation letter to White Bird earlier this month, they downloaded confidential client information, training manuals and other materials to give to the newer non-profit.
White Bird is also accusing the WVCC of infringing on its CAHOOTS trademark through advertising materials and other public outreach efforts, and of passing off White Bird’s services as its own."
Jill Goldsmith, Deadline; Disney Sends Cease And Desist Letter To Character.ai For Copyright Infringement As Studios Move To Protect IP
"Walt Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Character.AI, a “personalized superintelligence platform” that the media giant says is ripping off copyrighted characters without authorization.
The AI startup offers users the ability to create customizable, personalized AI companions that can be totally original but in some cases are inspired by existing characters, including, it seems, Disney icons from Spider-Man and Darth Vader to Moana and Elsa.
The letter is the latest legal salvo by Hollywood as studios begin to step up against AI. Disney has also sued AI company Midjourney for allegedly improper use and distribution of AI-generated characters from Disney films. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures this month sued Chinese AI firm MiniMax for copyright infringement."
Virginie Berger , Forbes; The AI Copyright Battle: Why OpenAI And Google Are Pushing For Fair Use
"Furthermore, the ongoing lawsuits against AI firms could serve as a necessary correction to push the industry toward genuinely intelligent machine learning models instead of data-compression-based generators masquerading as intelligence. If legal challenges force AI firms to rethink their reliance on copyrighted content, it could spur innovation toward creating more advanced, ethically sourced AI systems...
A sustainable solution must reconcile technological innovation with creators' economic interests. Policymakers should develop clear federal standards specifying fair use parameters for AI training, considering solutions such as:
These nuanced policies could encourage innovation without sacrificing creators’ rights.
The lobbying by OpenAI and Google reveals broader tensions between rapid technological growth and ethical accountability. While national security concerns warrant careful consideration, they must not justify irresponsible regulation or ethical compromises. A balanced approach, preserving innovation, protecting creators’ rights, and ensuring sustainable and ethical AI development, is critical for future global competitiveness and societal fairness."
Thomas Claburn , The Register; Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder
"A judge has found Meta must answer a claim it allegedly removed so-called copyright management information from material used to train its AI models.
The Friday ruling by Judge Vince Chhabria concerned the case Kadrey et al vs Meta Platforms, filed in July 2023 in a San Francisco federal court as a proposed class action by authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, who reckon the Instagram titan's use of their work to train its neural networks was illegal.
Their case burbled along until January 2025 when the plaintiffs made the explosive allegation that Meta knew it used copyrighted material for training, and that its AI models would therefore produce results that included copyright management information (CMI) – the fancy term for things like the creator of a copyrighted work, its license and terms of use, its date of creation, and so on, that accompany copyrighted material.
The miffed scribes alleged Meta therefore removed all of this copyright info from the works it used to train its models so users wouldn’t be made aware the results they saw stemmed from copyrighted stuff."
, The Federalist Society; An AI Maker Was Just Found Liable for Copyright Infringement. What Does This Portend for Content Creators and AI Makers?
"In a case decided on February 11, the makers of generative AI (GenAI), such as ChatGPT, lost the first legal battle in the war over whether they commit copyright infringement by using the material of others as training data without permission. The case is called Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc.
If other courts follow this ruling, the cost of building and selling GenAI services will dramatically increase. Such businesses are already losing money.
The ruling could also empower content creators, such as writers, to deny the use of their material to train GenAIs or to demand license fees. Some creators might be unwilling to license use of their material for training AIs due to fear that GenAI will destroy demand for their work."
Manish Singh, TechCrunch; Indian news agency sues OpenAI alleging copyright infringement
"One of India’s largest news agencies, Asian News International (ANI), has sued OpenAI in a case that could set a precedent for how AI companies use copyrighted news content in the world’s most populous nation.
Asian News International filed a 287-page lawsuit in the Delhi High Court on Monday, alleging the AI company illegally used its content to train its AI models and generated false information attributed to the news agency. The case marks the first time an Indian media organization has taken legal action against OpenAI over copyright claims.
During Tuesday’s hearing, Justice Amit Bansal issued a summons to OpenAI after the company confirmed it had already ensured that ChatGPT wasn’t accessing ANI’s website. The bench said that it was not inclined to grant an injunction order on Tuesday, as the case required a detailed hearing for being a “complex issue.”
The next hearing is scheduled to be held in January."
