Posts Tagged: "copyrights"

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and Peter Welch (D-VT) sent a letter addressed to Liang Rubo, CEO of Chinese technology company ByteDance, urging the immediate shutdown of ByteDance’s video generation platform Seedance 2.0. Calling ByteDance’s recent pledges to respect copyright “a delay tactic,” the Senators join a growing chorus of copyright advocates raising alarms about rampant infringement being committed by users of Seedance and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today released its 2026 International IP Index, which flagged concerning trends about the “growing erosion of IP leadership” among the world’s high-performing economies, according to the report’s authors. In particular, the report noted that scores in eight EU Member States have declined this year, although the top ten rankings remained the same from 2025. The United States was again number one, with a relatively stable score of 95.15% compared with last year’s 95.17%.

Just over a month ago, the Human Artistry Campaign launched “Stealing Isn’t Innovation”—a graphic advertising campaign backed by over 1,000 artists, performers, authors, organizations and other creators. The Copyright Alliance joined dozens of groups and organizations supporting this powerful moment of creative community unity and strength. The campaign’s high-level three-word-message was simple and obvious, and difficult to contest. On a policy level, the campaign was widely, and correctly, understood as a clear statement supporting the core principle that training AI models on copyrighted works should be licensed by willing buyers and sellers.  “Big AI” published its response to this campaign in late February, speaking through two tech-aligned proxies—the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) and Public Knowledge (PK). For a number of reasons, it’s deeply unpersuasive. 

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.

In 1924, several changes were wrought to the format of the Olympic Games that remain permanent features more than a century later as the 2026 Winter Olympics take place in Milan Cortina. That year featured the first lodging for athletes in what would become the Olympic Village, the first radio broadcasts of live Olympic events, and the first edition of the Winter Olympics as a separate event for the summer games. Figure skating events were among the games introduced at the 1924 Winter Olympics in Chamonix, France, and a century later, the international competition has been roiled by a series of copyright authorization issues leaving some skaters scrambling to change their routine and avoid infringement liability.

The U.S. Copyright Office on Friday released its report pursuant to the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act, finding that the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) is largely successful but that there is “room for improvement in various respects.” The Copyright Claims Board (CCB), established by the December 2020 CASE Act, is an alternative to federal court where copyright owners can bring suits before a tribunal at the Copyright Office.

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.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act into Congress. If enacted as drafted, the bill would establish mandatory reporting requirements for companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) models that are trained using original works that are protected under U.S. copyright law, and would create an additional cause of action for copyright owners alleging that generative AI developers failed to give such notice with respect to their works.

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. 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.

Much of the focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been on training data ingestion—the moment when AI “steals” from creators. But legally, that’s not where the real fight should be. Decades of legal precedent—from search engines to image?scanning to streaming media—already give us a roadmap. No new formulation of copyright law by Congress, as suggested by some academics, is necessary. By considering these seven unique aspects of GenAI systems, copyright analysis is actually easy.