Posts in Copyright Litigation

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.

The first major decision in a U.S. copyright case involving content created using artificial intelligence (AI) was delivered on February 11, 2025. In Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware held that an AI legal research platform infringed the copyrights of a competing, non-AI platform owned by Thomson Reuters, by using content from Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform to train its AI platform. This is likely just the beginning of intellectual property (IP) infringement litigation arising out of the use of AI, and the importance to businesses of understanding the scope of insurance coverage potentially available for those claims cannot be overstated.

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) technology and copyright law pits an irresistible force against an evolving and uncertain legal framework. The latest case making waves in this struggle is Concord Music Group, Inc. v. Anthropic PBC, in which Concord Music Group and other publishers alleged copyright infringement by the AI company Anthropic. One of the major issues in the case revolves around whether Anthropic’s AI models, specifically its large language models (LLMs), are generating infringing content because the results were derived from copyrighted works.

The controversy surrounding AI and copyright extends beyond the courtroom to the art market, where AI-generated works are increasingly contested. The ruling in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence adds legal weight to concerns about AI’s impact on creative and commercial markets, including the sale of fine art through auction houses and galleries, and its potential to compete directly with copyright holders.

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.

Copyright law provided an arena for some of the most interesting legal battles in 2024. We review some highlights from 2024 below, as well as some cases to watch in 2025.  

The U.S. Supreme Court today invited the Solicitor General (SG) to weigh in on a case about internet service provider (ISP) liability for infringement and denied another petition for certiorari asking the Court to clarify U.S. patent eligibility law. The latter petition also asked the Court to consider whether Judge Pauline Newman’s effective removal from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has deprived patent owners “of a fair hearing before a duly constituted appellate panel.”

The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday, November 7, dismissed a copyright infringement complaint filed by Raw Story Media and Alternet Media against OpenAI, holding that the news outlets lacked Article III standing to bring their claims. However, the court left open the possibility for the sites to file an amended complaint.

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.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that EU Member States are required to protect works of applied art in the European Union, irrespective of the country of origin of those works or the nationality of their author. The judgment in Case C-227/23 of 24 October 2024 (Kwantum versus Vitra) is a landmark copyright decision. The matter was referred to the CJEU by the Supreme Court of The Netherlands following a dispute between the companies Vitra and Kwantum.

On October 21, Los Angeles-based film production company Alcon Entertainment filed a lawsuit in the Central District of California alleging copyright infringement and false endorsement against automaker Tesla, its CEO Elon Musk and media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery. The suit claims that these parties are responsible for the creation of an artificial intelligence (AI) generated image of Tesla’s Cybercab using iconic imagery from Alcon’s 2017 theatrical release Blade Runner 2049. Alcon alleges that the image was displayed during a presentation given by Musk at a Cybercab launch event recently staged at Warner Bros. Burbank studios despite Alcon’s refusal to license film photography for Tesla’s event.

Cox Communications is the latest to file a brief in the battle between it and Sony Music Entertainment over whether an internet service provider (ISP) should be liable for infringement by its subscribers. According to Cox’s brief in opposition to Sony’s petition for certiorari, “[p]etitioners want to make a terrible situation even worse.” Music publishers including Sony, Arista Records, Warner Music and Universal Music Group filed copyright claims against Cox in July 2018, alleging that Cox was liable for the infringement of 10,017 musical works that were illegally distributed by the ISP’s subscribers. A 2020 jury verdict found that Cox liable for both vicarious and contributory infringement, leading to a $1 billion damages verdict against Cox after damages were increased for the jury’s willfulness finding.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit on Tuesday, October 15, ruled that a district court applied the wrong test for assessing personal jurisdiction in a case involving alleged counterfeit dolls being sold on Amazon. The U.S. District Court for the District of Utah denied a motion for default judgment filed by Utah-based Bountiful Baby, a maker of kits for creating “reborn dolls,” against two Chinese companies— Adolly US (AUS) and Reborn Doll Gallery (RDG)—that it claimed were selling counterfeit versions of the dolls on Amazon.com.

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 day two of IPWatchdog LIVE 2024, IPW Founder and CEO Gene Quinn sat down with Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to discuss the question on everyone’s mind across nearly every sector and sphere of IP practice—from registration to enforcement and beyond, how will AI change the game? Perlmutter is the first Copyright Office Register to attend IPWatchdog LIVE. She told attendees about her journey from a career as a professional singer into government, which she was introduced to by former Register Marybeth Peters in the 1990s.