Posts in Copyright

OpenAI published a post on Friday, titled “Fair use benefits everyone,” featuring excerpts from 20 filings that urge the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to find that training large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted works is fair use. All but one are amicus briefs filed on or before the October 30 deadline in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, the multidistrict litigation (MDL) that combines copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI and Microsoft by The New York Times and other news publishers, Ziff Davis, and a group of authors, led by the Authors Guild, seeking to proceed as a class.

The demo works. A potential customer is interested. Then the contract arrives, asking the company to confirm that it has the rights necessary to provide the product, protect customer information, and stand behind an infringement claim. The company’s customer commitments must match the rights it actually holds. A working demo alone cannot establish that match.

A meme can travel from a private joke to a global advertising campaign before its creator – or the owner of the image behind it – has time to object. Coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe a unit of cultural transmission that replicates and mutates as it spreads, “memes” include reaction GIFs, catchphrases, and familiar templates such as “Distracted Boyfriend” and “Surprised Pikachu.” For brands and creators, that speed and reach can be irresistible: the right meme, deployed at the right moment, can reach millions within hours.

Several owners of Elvis Presley compositions filed a lawsuit against Anthropic on October 23 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that the company copied copyrighted lyrics without authorization to train its Claude large language models (LLMs) and that Claude generated infringing versions of the songs. The complaint asserted claims for direct copyright infringement, circumvention of technological protection measures under Section 1201 of Title 17, and removal or alteration of copyright management information (CMI) under Section 1202.

The U.S. Supreme Court issued an order on Monday in BMG Rights Management (US) LLC v. Vetter affirming the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s judgment granting a songwriter ownership of the worldwide copyright in “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” The Court entered the affirmance under 28 U.S.C. Section 2109, following a September 30 reply in which BMG Rights Management (US) LLC and the other petitioners urged the Court to grant certiorari and reverse.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Frederick L. Allen, et al. v. Joshua Stein, Governor of North Carolina, a decade-plus long case that led to a Supreme Court decision as well as the introduction and subsequent repeal of a law to shield North Carolina from copyright liability. In January 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued the most recent ruling in the case, which related to Frederick (“Rick) Allen’s copyright battle against the State of North Carolina over documentary footage of a state-sponsored salvage project exhuming a shipwreck associated with the famed pirate, Blackbeard. Videographer Frederick Allen and his company Nautilus Productions recorded footage of a private company’s project to salvage Blackbeard’s flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge from the North Carolina coastline.

I have spent my career around artists: booking them, interviewing them, publishing their stories and watching how this business treats the people who make it run. Right now the most valuable thing many of those artists own is not a catalog. It is their voice. And in the United States, how well that voice is protected still depends on where you happen to be standing. That has to change. Congress should pass one federal voice-and-likeness right, and it should do it now.

An Ohio judge has ruled that Amazon must face trial on claims that its Merch on Demand service directly and vicariously infringed an apparel company’s copyrights, although the company’s contributory-infringement claim was dismissed. In an October 14 opinion, U.S. District Judge Douglas R. Cole of the Southern District of Ohio denied Amazon and plaintiff Weekend Warrior Clothing LLC—a T-shirt company founded by two brothers—summary judgment on most of their competing claims.

Today, the U.S. Copyright Office published a notice of inquiry (NOI) in the Federal Register soliciting public comment on issues related to music piracy threatening billions in U.S. domestic revenues generated by digital streaming. The Office’s NOI responds to a request into the prevalence of streaming fraud across the music industry issued by U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), who also voiced concerns about generative artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on the music industry.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling under seal affirming the District of Delaware’s grant of partial summary judgment to Canadian technology company Thomson Reuters on its claims that legal artificial intelligence (AI) company ROSS Intelligence infringed upon more than 2,000 copyrighted headnote summaries of U.S. case law from its Westlaw legal research platform.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to impose new requirements on social-media companies, search engines and other online platforms whose advertising systems help impersonation scams reach consumers. In a September 24 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM), the FTC requested information about platforms’ ad-optimization tools, financial incentives and efforts to prevent fraudulent advertisers from impersonating government agencies and legitimate businesses.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a minute order on September 18, in Perlmutter v. Blanche, staying the lawsuit brought by Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter until December 18, 2026. Judge Timothy J. Kelly pointed to the House of Representatives’ June passage of the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, H.R. 6028, which would designate the Register of Copyrights as an officer “appointed by the President” with the advice and consent of the Senate.

Online counterfeiting has become ubiquitous. A seller located anywhere in the world can create a digital storefront, copy a brand owner’s photographs and product descriptions, adopt a business name that reveals nothing, and begin selling into the United States before the brand owner even knows the account exists. If the seller is discovered and enforcement begins, the listing disappears, the money moves out of the country and beyond the practical reach of the court system, and a new account surfaces under a different name. Then the entire process repeats.

Representative Darrell Issa introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA) on Monday, a bill aimed at creating an expedited judicial mechanism for copyright owners to obtain orders blocking access to certain foreign piracy sites. While the official text of the bill has not yet been published, several groups have responded based on their review of a draft of the bill that was circulated to stakeholders in May 2025.