Posts Tagged: "Copyright Litigation"

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday granted summary judgment in favor of Pinterest, Inc. in a copyright infringement suit brought by the estate of a professional photographer, finding that the social media platform is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s (DMCA) safe harbor provision.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday affirmed a district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of Paramount Pictures Corporation in a copyright and contract dispute brought by the heirs of the author of the 1983 magazine article that inspired the original Top Gun film. Shosh Yonay and Yuval Yonay, the widow and son of Ehud Yonay, first brought claims against Paramount in 2022, alleging that the sequel Top Gun: Maverick infringed on the copyright of Ehud Yonay’s article, “Top Guns.” The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in 2024 granted summary judgment for Paramount, agreeing that Maverick did not share “substantial amounts of the article’s original expression and that the depicted pilots and their experiences were factual and therefore unprotected by copyright law.

On December 19, Google LLC filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against SerpApi, LLC, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The suit centers on claims that SerpApi, a “scraping” service, unlawfully circumvents Google’s technological barriers to scrape copyrighted content from its search results pages on a massive scale, thereby profiting from Google’s efforts without compensation.

In a year dominated by artificial intelligence (AI) copyright cases, 2025 also featured several influential cases on traditional copyright issues that will impact copyright owners, internet service providers, website owners, advertisers, social media users, media companies, and many others. Although the U.S. Supreme Court did not decide a copyright case this year, it heard argument on secondary liability and willfulness issues in Cox v. Sony. Lower courts continued to wrestle with applying the fair use factors two years after the Supreme Court issued Warhol v. Goldsmith. The divide over whether the “server test” applies to embedded works deepened—and remains unsettled. And the Ninth Circuit further refined the standard for pleading access to online works. This article highlights some of the most important copyright cases from this year and their practical implications.

A New York judge ruled on Monday that OpenAI cannot stop a consolidated, multi-district class action brought against by dozens of authors for direct copyright infringement by the outputs of its large language model (LLM), ChatGPT. OpenAI argued that the plaintiffs had failed to allege substantial similarity between the works and ChatGPT’s outputs, but Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said  that “[a] more discerning observer could reasonably conclude that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”

Following a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on August 27 requesting its appeal be held in abeyance, AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay what the plaintiffs are calling “the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment.” According to the “Unopposed Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Settlement” filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, Anthropic will pay the plaintiffs, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, and MJ & KJ, Inc. and the Class “at least $1.5 billion dollars, plus interest,” amounting to about $3,000 per 500,000 works in the Class.

Last Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an opinion in Thaler v. Perlmutter affirming the denial of a copyright application filed by artificial intelligence (AI) developer Dr. Stephen Thaler to an image created by one of Thaler’s generative AI systems. Although the appellate court did not categorically reject registrability of all AI-generated works, the D.C. Circuit agreed with the agency that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human being.

Yesterday, Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation in the District of Delaware, issued a ruling updating a previous summary judgment decision dismissing copyright infringement allegations made by Westlaw legal research service provider Thomson Reuters against a competing artificial intelligence (AI) search tool developed by Ross Intelligence. Among the top reconsiderations in Judge Bibas’ recent decision is his fair use analysis, which now recognizes the non-transformative nature of Ross’ use of copyrighted headnotes that summarize legal decisions.

Late last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a ruling in Structured Asset Sales, LLC v. Sheeran affirming the Southern District of New York’s dismissal of copyright infringement claims filed against British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran over his 2014 single “Thinking Out Loud.” Assessing arguments made by a co-rightsholder to Marvin Gaye’s 1973 single “Let’s Get It On,” the Second Circuit found that the district court properly limited the scope of the infringement allegations to Gaye’s sheet music deposit copy filed at the U.S. Copyright Office, and that the plaintiff’s “selection-and-arrangement” theory relied on musical elements too unoriginal for copyright even in combination.

In a landmark judgment with far reaching ramifications, a German court recently held that the copying of images by Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network (LAION) – a nonprofit organization that provides datasets, tools and models to liberate machine learning research – did not infringe copyright law. The Kneschke v. LAION case, heard by the Hamburg Regional Court, centered on LAION’s automatic downloading of images, including a copyrighted work by photographer Robert Kneschke, for AI training purposes. In 2021, LAION, based in Hamburg, automatically downloaded images from the internet, including Kneschke’s photo from Bigstock, to create a dataset (LAION 5B) containing image-text pairs for training AI. Kneschke claimed LAION infringed his copyright by copying his image without permission to create a dataset that linked images with descriptive text. LAION had downloaded the photo from a licensed website to check if it matched the description using its software.

On August 29, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina issued an order addressing several motions in Allen v. Cooper, a case that mirrors the back-and-forth nature of an epic maritime battle—this time, between a government and an individual. The case began with an alleged copyright infringement, but has blossomed into a larger suit, alleging multiple constitutional violations.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in the music industry has brought about a complex and contentious landscape where innovation intersects with intellectual property rights. Recently, two leading text-to-music AI tools, Suno and Udio, have found themselves at the center of this debate, facing lawsuits for copyright infringement filed by the three major record labels, and led by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The record labels allege that Suno and Udio used their recordings without a license to train Suno’s and Udio’s respective AI models. These claims bring to light broader issues regarding the ethical and legal implications of AI-generated content, the need for regulatory clarity, and the evolving relationship between technology and creativity.

Picture this: You own a women’s swimwear business. You engage your customers by curating eye-popping images on social media that exude athleticism and style. While browsing online, you find a photo posted by someone else of a woman in one of your pink swimsuits diving into a pool. You instantly know that this woman is exactly who your customers want to be! You share it on your profile with the caption, “Making waves wherever I go” and link to your swimsuit for purchase. Within hours the post racks up 50,000 likes and 2,000 swimsuit orders. But the excitement quickly wears off when you receive an email from a law firm representing the photographer, claiming you infringed her copyright.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled on Friday that Shosh Yonay and Yuval Yonay, the widow and son of Ehud Yonay, who authored a 1983 magazine article that inspired the renowned film, Top Gun, were not entitled to damages for copyright infringement related to the 2022 sequel to the film. Yonay authored a magazine article titled “Top Guns,” published in California Magazine on April 21, 1983, that was an account of the experiences of F-14 pilots in training at Navy’s Fighter Weapons School, known as “Top Gun.”