Posts in Copyright

The U.S. Supreme Court justices today seemed skeptical of Cox Communications’ arguments that it should not be held liable for contributory infringement for failing to terminate internet access to subscribers who were alleged to have committed infringement, but had tough questions for both sides in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, Inc.

The practice of music sampling, which is the integration of pre-recorded sounds into new musical gestures, experienced a golden, unregulated age in the late 1980s that is almost unimaginable today. Major works like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) layered dozens of samples on a single track, while massive commercial hits like Tone-L?c’s “Wild Thing” (1988) openly lifted core musical elements.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) today released its second edition of the WIPO Pulse comprehensive survey, titled “Global intellectual property perception survey 2025,” analyzing the perceptions of intellectual property of 35,500 respondents in 74 countries that represent approximately 80% of the target population aged 18 to 65 worldwide between February 20 and April 25.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Halicki v. Carroll Shelby Licensing, a case in which Denice Shakarian Halicki, widow of the creator of the “Gone in 60 Seconds” film franchise sought review of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision that held the car character “Eleanor,” a customized Ford Mustang, was not entitled to copyright protection.

Two weeks after the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay an interlocutory injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in September that allowed Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to return to her post pending her lawsuit against President Donald Trump for allegedly illegally removing her from office, Perlmutter has responded. In her opposition to the application for a stay, filed on Monday, Perlmutter accused the administration of making “an inexcusable mess of Congress’s plans for the governance of its Library.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted a motion from the U.S. Solicitor General to participate in oral argument as an amicus in the copyright case between Cox Communications and Sony Music Entertainment. The order allows the government to weigh in during the December 1 hearing on whether an internet service provider (ISP) can be held contributorily liable for copyright infringement committed by its users.

Today, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE of the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice issued a highly awaited ruling in Getty Images (US) Inc. v. Stability AI Ltd., a case which was expected to have major implications in determining liability for generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers under UK intellectual property law. The 205-page decision, which mainly focuses on Getty’s trademark claim while also clarifying important aspects of secondary copyright liability in the AI context, failed to address certain fundamental questions in large part because Getty failed to raise sufficient evidence to proceed with its claim of primary copyright infringement at trial.

On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, which is urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”

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.”

Reddit filed a lawsuit yesterday against artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity AI and three other defendants for their alleged illegal circumvention of Reddit security measures meant to protect misuse of its content and data. Reddit, which describes itself in the complaint as “one of the largest repositories of human conversation in existence,” likened the actions of Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi to those of “would-be bank robbers.” Through their development of tools that bypass both Google’s and Reddit’s anti-scraping measures, and their scraping of Reddit content from Google search results, these defendants, “knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” said the complaint.

The $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, recently granted preliminary approval, is the largest copyright settlement in American legal history. That’s impressive, but more important, it shows tech companies must play by the same rules as everyone else. Tech companies regularly ask for special treatment, arguing their innovations are too important to be slowed down by existing laws. But when these companies grow big enough to affect billions of people’s lives, those early shortcuts become serious problems.

Taking their cue from the recent Bartz v. Anthropic saga, the authors of a neuroscience book and professors at the State University of New York filed a class action complaint on October 9 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple Inc. committed mass copyright infringement by using pirated books to train its artificial intelligence systems. Plaintiffs Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik claimed that Apple built its Apple Intelligence platform, including its OpenELM and Foundation Models, by making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works without permission or compensation.

Dr. Stephen Thaler has taken his fight to get works created by artificial intelligence (AI) machines recognized as copyrightable to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his petition for certiorari, filed October 9 by Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, Thaler is asking the court to take up the question: “Whether works outputted by an AI system without a direct, traditional authorial contribution by a natural person can be copyrighted.”

In 2025, three federal courts finally confronted a question that had hovered over artificial intelligence for years: can machines legally learn from copyrighted works? Each opinion—Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, Bartz v. Anthropic, and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms—applied the four-factor fair-use test under 17 U.S.C. §107 to large-scale model training. Together, they form the first real framework for evaluating how copyright interacts with machine learning.