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."
JON BRODKIN, Ars Technica ; Sony’s failed war against Internet piracy may doom other copyright lawsuits
"Sony and other major record labels recently suffered a thorough defeat at the Supreme Court in their attempt to make Internet service providers pay huge financial penalties for their customers’ copyright infringement. Sony’s loss is certain to have wide-ranging effects on copyright lawsuits, offering protection for ISPs, their customers, and potentially other technology companies whose services can be used for both legal and illegal purposes.
In Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Supreme Court ruled that cable Internet firm Cox is not liable under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when its customers use their broadband connections to download or upload pirated materials."
Pesala Bandara, PetaPixel; Court Revives Copyright Lawsuit Over Annie Leibovitz’s ‘Star Wars’ Photos
"An appeals court has revived Annie Leibovitz’s agency’s copyright lawsuit against an online magazine over its use of her photographs from the Star Wars movie set.
On Tuesday, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a lower court wrongly dismissed the lawsuit brought by licensing company Great Bowery Inc. against online outlet Consequence Sound LLC based on a lower court’s misunderstanding of copyright law.
The dispute centers on a group of Star Wars cast photographs taken by Leibovitz for Vanity Fair. In 2014, Leibovitz signed an “Artist Agreement” with Trunk Archive, a business operated by Great Bowery, granting the company the “exclusive worldwide right to license, market, and promote” certain images from the shoot."
DEVON JAMES , Los Angeles Magazine; Meta’s AI Copyright Fight Just Escalated and Hollywood Is Watching Closely
A new lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg and Meta could reshape how studios, publishers and tech companies train the next generation of artificial intelligence
"The AI Gold Rush Is Running Into Copyright Law
According to the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court, Meta allegedly pulled material from massive libraries of pirated books and scraped internet content to train Llama, the company’s flagship large language model. Publishers argue the practice amounts to one of the largest copyright violations in modern history."
HILLEL ITALIE , AP; Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorized’ Meta’s copyright infringement, publishers allege
"The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta “followed their well-known motto ‘move fast and break things’” by illegally drawing upon a massive trove of books and journal articles for Llama."
Brooks Barnes, The New York Times ; ‘Avatar’ Suit Focuses on Hot Topic in A.I. Age: A Character’s Face
"An actress accused the director James Cameron of stealing her likeness to create an “Avatar” character in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday in California — a case that reflects a core fear among Hollywood performers in the artificial intelligence age: losing control of their own faces.
The actress, Q’orianka Kilcher, also sued Disney, which controls the multibillion-dollar “Avatar” franchise, which started in 2009...
The lawsuit involves Neytiri, the digitally created, blue-skinned warrior princess in Mr. Cameron’s three “Avatar” blockbusters. According to the complaint, Mr. Cameron used a photo of Ms. Kilcher as a teenager — without her knowledge — as the foundation for Neytiri, incorporating her features “directly into his production art” and digital production pipeline.
“Neytiri’s lips, chin, jawline and overall mouth shape” in the trilogy “are Q’orianka Kilcher’s,” the complaint said. “This was not a fleeting inspiration or a vague homage; it was a literal transplant of a real teenager’s facial structure.”
In 2010, Ms. Kilcher, who is also an Indigenous rights activist, met Mr. Cameron by chance at a charity event in Hollywood, where he told her that she was the “early inspiration” for Neytiri’s look, according to the complaint. “She did not take this to mean that her actual face had been replicated,” the complaint said.
Ms. Kilcher is suing now, the complaint said, because of an interview that Mr. Cameron gave to a French media outlet in 2024. In the interview, Mr. Cameron mentions Ms. Kilcher and “points to an image of Neytiri and says unambiguously: ‘This is actually her lower face,’” the complaint said. The interview came to her attention a year later."
Graham Bowley, The New York Times; $100 Million Award Made in Suit Over Unlicensed Robert Indiana Art
"An art publisher accused in a civil suit of isolating Robert Indiana, the artist, in the final years of his life, has been found to have created unauthorized or adulterated versions of Indiana’s work by a New York jury.
The jury in federal court in Manhattan found in favor of Indiana’s former business partner, the Morgan Art Foundation, a for-profit company, that sued the publisher, Michael McKenzie, on the grounds that he had interfered with its rights by making Indiana works that he did not have the authority to produce.
Among the works cited in the suit were some based on the most famous of Indiana’s works, a depiction of the word “love” in capital letters, with the L and a jauntily tilted O perched atop the V and E. The image is recreated in sculptures that sit in plazas in several cities and on coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets worldwide.
The jury awarded Morgan $102.2 million in damages."
Blake Brittain, Reuters; Anthropic seeks pivotal court win in music publisher lawsuit over AI training
"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has asked a California federal court to rule in its favor in a copyright lawsuit brought by music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO, arguing it made "fair use" of their song lyrics to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.
Anthropic's Monday filing addresses the key question for a wave of high-stakes copyright cases brought by creators against tech companies: is it legally permissible to copy millions of copyrighted works without permission to train AI models?...
The lawsuit is one of dozens of disputes between copyright owners such as authors and news outlets, and tech giants including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over the training of their AI systems. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last yearto pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit."
MOLLY CRANE-NEWMAN , New York Daily News via Chicago Tribune; Judge slams key OpenAI witness in copyright infringement case for ‘hazy recollections’
"An unimpressed Manhattan judge ordered a corporate representative for OpenAI to undergo a second deposition after finding he failed to answer “even the simplest questions” the first time around about what the company has described as efforts to limit chatbots from stealing writers’ work.
Magistrate Judge Ona Wang, in a sharply-worded 11-page order Tuesday, said OpenAI had been put on notice that the company’s purported expert on plagiarism John Vincent “Vinnie” Monaco was woefully underprepared for his January deposition, ordering him to submit to 3.5 more hours of questioning that took place Wednesday.
In granting a motion from the Chicago Tribune, New York Times and other news outlets suing OpenAI to compel the additional testimony, Wang deferred ruling on a request for sanctions, saying it would depend on how Monaco fared in his do-over. She said she may issue fines or recommend some of his answers be deemed as admissions.
OpenAI has previously said that Monaco has more knowledge than any of its engineers about Project Giraffe, an internal operation which the company claims is designed to develop ways to limit its learning language models, or LLMs, from inadvertently regurgitating copyrighted works — the issue at the core of the ongoing Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit."
Jake Angelo, Fortune; The dictionaries are suing OpenAI for ‘massive’ copyright infringement, and say ChatGPT is starving publishers of revenue
"In a filing submitted to the Southern District of New York, the companies accuse OpenAI of cannibalizing the traffic and ad revenue that publishers depend on to survive. “ChatGPT starves web publishers, like [the] Plaintiffs, of revenue,” the complaint reads. Where a traditional search engine sends users to a publisher’s website, Britannica and Merriam-Webster allege ChatGPT instead absorbs the content and delivers a polished answer. It also alleges the AI company fed its LLM with researched and fact-checked work of the companies’ hundreds of human writers and editors...
In an apt example, the complaint describes a prompt asking “How does Merriam-Webster define plagiarize?” to which the model reportedly responded with a definition identical to the one found in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The complaint adds that the dictionary has been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office."
MIKE PEARL , Gizmodo; ByteDance’s Controversial AI Video Model Reportedly on Hold Globally Due to Copyright Disputes
, CT Insider; Waterbury's Post University awarded $75.3M in copyright infringement lawsuit
"A federal jury composed of Connecticut residents has ordered the education software company Learneo to pay Post University more than $75.3 million in damages for distributing school-owned documents on its Course Hero platform.
The Hartford jury found the San Francisco-based company violated U.S. copyright law by hosting the documents without permission and altered the files to conceal the infringement, according to court records."
Sara Fischer, Axios; Nielsen's Gracenote sues OpenAI for copyright infringement
"How it works: Gracenote employs hundreds of editors who use human insight and judgment to create millions of narrative descriptions, original video descriptors, unique identifiers and other program identifiers that TV providers and other clients can use to help customers discover content.
For example, Gracenote editors described HBO's "Game of Thrones" as "the depiction of two power families — kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars and honest men — playing a deadly game of control of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, and to sit atop the Iron Throne."
In the lawsuit, Gracenote alleges OpenAI scraped and used a near-exact copy of that descriptor when prompted by a ChatGPT user to describe "Game of Thrones."
It provides several other examples where, with minimal prompting, OpenAI's various ChatGPT models recite large portions of Gracenote's program descriptions verbatim.
Between the lines: Gracenote's entire Programs Database, which includes its metadata and the proprietary relational map its editors use to connect that data, is registered with the U.S. Copyright Office."
"A group of music labels secured near-total victory in a copyright-infringement lawsuit against the seller of ten documentaries about various bands.
Coda Publishing Ltd. and its owner willfully infringed more than 100 songs by the Rolling Stones, ABBA, U2, Nirvana, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynrd, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said. The Wednesday order, citing reasons stated orally in court earlier that day, resolved summary judgment motions filed in 2021 in a case that had been stayed since a 2022 discovery sanctions ruling against the labels."
JACK NICASTRO, Reason; Judge Lets Blade Runner 2049 Copyright Suit Against Elon Musk and Tesla Move Forward
"Wu's ruling will set a precedent for copyright holders to sue anyone whom they assume illegally copied their intellectual property to create something entirely unmistakable for it because the cases will be less likely to be dismissed. This means an increase in the expected cost of using generative AI—litigation is expensive—and a corresponding decrease in creative, productive uses of this revolutionary technology."
Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang sufficiently considered privacy concerns against the material’s relevance to the ongoing litigation in her discovery ruling in favor of news organization plaintiffs in five lawsuits, District Judge Sidney H. Stein said in an order Monday. She rejected OpenAI’s arguments it should be allowed to run a search of the 20 million-log sample and produce conversations implicating the plaintiffs’ works, saying no case law requires the court to order the least burdensome discovery possible."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; AI copyright battles enter pivotal year as US courts weigh fair use
"The sprawling legal fight over tech companies' vast copying of copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence systems could be entering a decisive phase in 2026.
After a string of fresh lawsuits and a landmark settlement in 2025, the new year promises to bring a wave of rulings that could define how U.S. copyright law applies to generative AI. At stake is whether companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta can rely on the legal doctrine of fair use to shield themselves from liability – or if they must reimburse copyright holders, which could cost billions."
In the coming months, we’ll see decisions in two key cases: whether Anthropic PBC’s historic $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors will receive final approval and if music publishers’ separate copyright lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company will head to trial in September.
Here’s a closer look at the California legal battles that could redefine the landscape of IP law next year."
Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI Hit With Copyright Suit from Writers
"Writers including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou filed a copyright lawsuit accusing six AI giants of using pirated copies of their books to train large language models.
The complaint, filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic PBC,
It is the first copyright lawsuit against xAI over its training process, and the first suit brought by authors against Perplexity...
Carreyrou is among the authors who opted out of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with Anthropic."
"Authors in a putative class action copyright suit against
