Posts in Copyright Litigation

Stock photos. Blog thumbnails. Social media posts. Hero images. The image that makes a website look finished is often the same image that triggers a copyright demand letter. The facts usually are ordinary, not dramatic. A business hires a web designer or marketing contractor. The contractor pulls an image from someplace online, uses it on a site or post, and disappears. Months later, the owner receives a letter attaching a Visual Arts, or VA, registration and threatening statutory damages.

It’s easy to take for granted that books, news, films, shows, songs, video games, photographs, artwork, and more are ubiquitously available through apps, streams, downloads and other digital means. But the thriving legitimate digital marketplace we enjoy today didn’t emerge by accident. It was built, in significant part, on the historical bedrock of secondary liability—the well-established common-law legal principle that one who assists another in committing a wrong is just as liable as the direct wrongdoer. In the internet ecosystem, that means platforms, internet service providers (ISPs), and other online intermediaries bear some responsibility when they knowingly facilitate or profit from copyright infringement.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday denied motions to dismiss three copyright infringement lawsuits brought by a jury consultant, Lindsay Olson, against criminal defense attorneys representing defendants charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, who downloaded her copyrighted report from a public docket and republished it in their own clients’ cases.

While artificial intelligence (AI) companies have long maintained that copyright law poses a significant barrier to innovation, it’s getting harder for them to make that argument with a straight face. It was one thing to claim that early text-based chatbots were magical boxes that didn’t really depend on the copyrighted works used to train them—a pretense that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. But it’s quite another to make such claims when their systems are spitting out nearly perfect audiovisual renditions of Disney’s copyrighted characters, including Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Darth Vader from Star Wars, and Elsa from Frozen. That’s what Midjourney was doing when Disney sued it for infringement, and it’s also what OpenAI was doing when it struck a licensing deal with Disney.

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted certiorari to a petition brought by internet service provider (ISP) Grande Communications Networks LLC, appealing from a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that upheld a jury verdict holding Grande Communications liable for contributory infringement against a group of major U.S. record labels. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and then vacated the judgment and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration under the Court’s recent opinion in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruling that internet service provider Cox Communications, Inc., is not contributorily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement. In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Thomas, the Court held that a service provider is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only when it intended for its service to be used in that way, which is established only if the provider either encouraged the infringement or designed the service specifically to facilitate it.

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list including the denial of a petition for writ of certiorari filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler that challenged federal agency and court rulings preventing copyright registration for an image generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). In following the U.S. Solicitor General’s call to deny cert to Thaler’s appeal, the Supreme Court declined invitations from both sides of the AI authorship debate to clarify the copyrightability of works that are substantially AI-generated.

As the AI revolution accelerates and continues to reshape traditional business models, it has triggered a cascade of new legal, regulatory and policy challenges. At the forefront of these emerging issues are a growing number of high-stakes legal battles between content creators and major Generative AI (GenAI) companies behind large language models (LLMs). This article examines key legal themes and critical questions arising from recent developments at the intersection of AI and Copyright law.

Concord Music Group, Inc., Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music, Inc. filed a complaint on Wednesday for copyright and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations against Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, adding another lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence companies. The publishers alleged that Anthropic engaged in mass piracy by downloading millions of unauthorized copies of books containing their copyrighted musical compositions from notorious pirate library websites, including Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi). The complaint argued that Anthropic used BitTorrent to acquire these works and subsequently trained its Claude AI models on the stolen content, thereby directly infringing the publishers’ exclusive rights and undermining the music licensing market.

On January 23, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a petition from Stephen Thaler, who seeks copyright protection for a work created by his artificial intelligence (AI) system. The DOJ argued that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit correctly upheld the United States Copyright Office’s refusal to register a copyright for an image that was admittedly created without human authorship.

On Friday, January 23, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a ruling in Allen v. Stein that likely ends a decade-long copyright battle over documentary footage of a state-sponsored salvage project exhuming a shipwreck associated with the famed pirate Blackbeard. Reversing and vacating rulings by the Eastern District of North Carolina, the Fourth Circuit found that an erroneous legal standard was used in allowing Allen to pursue a new theory for his copyright claims, remanding the case to the district court with directions to dismiss Allen’s complaint with prejudice.

On January 22, the Human Artistry Campaign, on behalf of a broad cross-section of the American creative community, launched a new advocacy campaign, titled “Stealing Isn’t Innovation.” The campaign’s core message is a direct protest against the “illegal mass harvesting of copyrighted works” by large technology companies to build and train their Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms.

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.