Posts in Copyright Litigation

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.

The recent $1.5 billion settlement between a major AI company and authors over copyright infringement represents far more than legal resolution—it marks the dawn of legitimate AI training data markets. This watershed moment signals the beginning of a necessary evolution toward market-based licensing schemes, much like how the music industry adapted to digital distribution by developing fair compensation frameworks for artists.

A number of amici have weighed in this week supporting ROSS Intelligence’s appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit challenging the originality and fair use rulings of the District of Delaware in a copyright infringement case brought by global legal information company, Thomson Reuters. ROSS’s petition for review was granted by the Third Circuit in June.

Imagine a friend borrows your car for a week. He promises to bring it back clean and full of gas. Reasonable enough, until you discover he racked up 1,500 miles because, while he wasn’t using it, he let his cousin run Uber shifts with it and pocketed a cut of the fares. You didn’t agree to that. You agreed to one driver, one purpose. The cousin had no right to free ride on your investment, devalue your property, or make money off your car without permission. Is it theft? Not quite. But it’s a textbook example of “conversion”—getting hold of something legally to use for a specific purpose, then deploying it in a very different manner. That, in essence, is what Zillow stands accused of doing to CoStar: Co-opting photos that CoStar put into public view, without authorization, to drive its own profits. The alleged free ride could cost Zillow nearly $7 billion.

The author plaintiffs in the high-profile case against AI company, Anthropic, filed a “Supplemental Brief in Support of Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Settlement” on Monday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing addressed outstanding issues following the Court’s initial preliminary approval hearing on September 8, including the plan of distribution.

Disney Enterprises and 11 other plaintiffs filed a complaint last week against Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) image and video generator MiniMax in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint alleged direct and secondary copyright infringement by operating a commercial AI service that “pirates and plunders Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale. MiniMax markets Hailuo AI as a ‘Hollywood studio in your pocket.’”

Following a split decision on September 10 that temporarily restored Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to her role, the Trump Administration has filed a petition for rehearing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit calling the court’s ruling an “extraordinary step”. The September 10 decision said that “the district court abused its discretion by failing to consider ‘unusual actions relating to the discharge itself’ and a ‘genuinely extraordinary situation’— factors that inform the irreparable-harm analysis and distinguish this case from other removal cases.”

Late last week, 18 amicus briefs were filed in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, the majority supporting the petitioners, Cox. The American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA) was the only amicus to recommend affirmance of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit’s 2024 ruling in favor of Sony.