Generative AI – Intellectual property cases and policy tracker

Following the centralization of a number of claims against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York (comprising (1) the news cases and (2) the class action cases), the Class Action Plaintiffs (including a number of renowned authors and The Authors' Guild) have filed a consolidated Complaint. The Complaint is for copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and contributory infringement.

Microsoft filed a Motion to Strike certain allegations from the Consolidated Class Action Complaint, relating to arguments that Microsoft infringed their copyrights when training its own models, and that Microsoft and OpenAI infringed when training new models "developed long after Plaintiffs filed their original lawsuits".  OpenAI filed a Motion to Dismiss 'output claims'.

On 27 October 2025, the Court issued two Opinions and Orders on the respective Motions to Dismiss. In the first Order, the Court dismissed OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss the class Plaintiffs' claim of direct copyright infringement based on the outputs of ChatGPT. In particular, the Court noted that a reasonable jury applying the more discerning observer test could determine that the output is substantially similar to the original work – stating that they were "most certainly attempts at abridgement or condensation of some of the central copyrightable elements of the original works such as setting, plot, and characters". An illustrative example based on the output summarising from George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones is reproduced in the opinion. However, the judge also makes clear that the opinion makes no conclusions on the fair use question.

In the second Order, the Court dismissed OpenAI's request to strike allegations relating to the "download claim" from the consolidated class action complaint but did strike allegations relating to certain new GPT models, as they did not form part of the original complaints before consolidation. The court also rejected Microsoft's motion to strike allegations relating to certain models.

This complaint was brought against OpenAI in the US District Court for the District of Delaware (now transferred to the Southern District of New York) by Ziff Davis, publishers of over 45 digital media publications and internet brands, including IGN, Mashable, CNET, ZDNET, PCMag, Lifehacker, BabyCenter and Everyday Health. As originally filed, the complaint was for: (1) copyright infringement through reproduction of the Plaintiffs' content to train OpenAI LLMs (2) copyright infringement through reproduction of Plaintiffs' content in output from OpenAI LLMs (3) contributory copyright infringement (4) common law unjust enrichment (5) circumvention of technical measures (6) removal of copyright management information (CMI) (7) distribution of works with CMI removed (8) trademark dilution of registered trademarks (9) dilution and injury to business reputation in violation of Delaware state law.

On 15 December 2025, the Court issued an order granting OpenAI the Motion to Dismiss aspects of the first Amended Complaint with respect to claims 4 (common law unjust enrichment – because it is pre-empted by the Copyright Act) and 5 (circumvention of technological measures, namely robots.txt files – because the complaint failed to establish they were a technological measure effectively controlling access to copyrighted works, and that OpenAI had circumvented that measure).  The order granted the motion in part and denied in part in relation to claim 8 (trademark dilution – motion denied against MASHABLE trademark but allowed for other marks). It was denied in relation to claims 3, 6 and 7 (contributory copyright infringement, removal of copyright management information and distribution of works with copyright management information removed). The motion to stay was denied as to claim 7, and moot as to the dismissed claims. A motion to stay was granted for models not already in the multi-district litigation.

A number of news publishers, including the Guardian, have brought proceedings in The US District Court for the Southern District of New York against Cohere, in relation to its 'Command Family' of LLM AI systems. The complaint particularly focuses on Cohere's 'heavy reliance' on 'retrieval augmented generation' (RAG), a term coined by a researcher now working at Cohere, which supplements a user's prompts with additional information from external data sources. The Complaint contains an exhibit which identifies over 4000 articles, said to be a non-exhaustive, illustrative list of the works that have been allegedly infringed, together with specific examples in another exhibit of copyright-infringing outputs, and examples of misleading outputs where Cohere is alleged to have passed off its own hallucinated articles as from the publishers. Cohere is also alleged to have disregarded do-not-crawl instructions via the robots.txt protocol.

The Complaint is for direct copyright infringement, secondary copyright infringement, trade mark infringement, and false designation of origin.

Cohere filed a Partial Motion to Dismiss relating to the claims focused on outputs – the claims of secondary copyright infringement, trade mark infringement and false designation of origin (and also the direct copyright infringement claim to the extent that it is based on 'substitutative summaries'). It posits itself as a 'different kind of AI company' specialising in enterprise AI solutions, suggesting that nothing in the Plaintiffs' complaint suggests that any real world customer of Cohere would use its solutions to infringe the Plaintiffs' copyrights. It refers to its terms of service which bar the uses made by the Plaintiffs and describes the entire outputs case as a "cynical, Plaintiff-crafted hypothetical". By its order of 13 November 2025, the court dismissed the Motion, finding that the Plaintiffs had adequately alleged the relevant complaints, including that "Command's outputs are quantitatively and qualitatively similar". The court referred to examples where Command had delivered outputs that were "near identical to Publishers' works". Whilst Cohere argued that the similarities are based on the use of the same facts, this was belied by examples showing that its outputs directly copied and pasted paragraphs of the Plaintiffs' articles verbatim.

This highly publicised case has been brought by The New York Times against Microsoft and OpenAI in the US District Court Southern District of New York, relating to ChatGPT (including associated offerings), Bing Chat and Microsoft 365 Copilot. It follows a period of months during which the NYT said it attempted to reach a negotiated agreement with Microsoft/OpenAI.

The Complaint raises arguments of large-scale commercial exploitation of NYT content, through the training of the relevant models (including GPT-4 and the next generation GPT-5), noting that the GPT LLMs have also 'memorized' copies of many of the works encoded into their parameters.  There are extensive exhibits (69 exhibits, comprising around 2000 pages) attached to the Complaint. Exhibit J in particular contains 100 examples of output from GPT-4 (as a 'small fraction') based on prompts in the form of a short snippet from the beginning of an NYT article. The example outputs are said to recite NYT content verbatim (or near-verbatim), closely summarise it, and mimic its expressive style (and also wrongly attribute false information - hallucinations - to NYT).

The Complaint also focuses on synthetic search applications built on the GPT LLMs which display extensive excepts or paraphrases of contents of search results, including NYT content, that may not have been included in the model's training set (noting that this contains more expressive content from the original article than would be the case in a traditional search result, and without the hyperlink to the NYT website).

The claims are for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unfair competition by misappropriation, and trade mark dilution.

The Plaintiffs filed an Amended Complaint on 12 August 2024 (the amendments add a further approximately 7 million works to the suit).

The case has been consolidated with The Daily News complaint and also with the claim brought by The Center for Investigative Reporting.

On 26 March 2025, the Court issued an order on the Motions to Dismiss by OpenAI and Microsoft as follows:

• Denied OpenAI's motions to dismiss the direct infringement claims involving conduct occurring more than three years before the complaints were filed
• Denied Defendants' motions to dismiss the contributory copyright infringement claims
• Denied Defendants' motions to dismiss the state and federal trademark dilution claims in the Daily News action
• Granted Defendants' motions to dismiss with prejudice the common law unfair competition by misappropriation claims
• Granted OpenAI's motion to dismiss with prejudice the 'abridgment' claims in the CIR action
• With respect to the DMCA claims:
  • Granted Microsoft's motions to dismiss the section 1202(b)(1) claims against it in all three actions
  • Granted OpenAI's motion to dismiss the section 1202(b)(1) claim against it in The New York Times action
  • Granted Defendants' motions to dismiss the section 1202(b)(3) claims against them in all three actions
  • all dismissed without prejudice
  • Denied OpenAI's motions to dismiss the section 1202(b)(1) claims against it in the Daily News and CIR actions

The Multidistrict Litigation Panel found a number of actions in the Northern District of California and the Southern District of New York involve common questions of fact and that centralization in the Southern District of New York would serve the parties' and witnesses' convenience and promote the just and efficient conduct of the litigation. 

The New York Times filed a Second Amended Complaint in order to bring its complaint in compliance with the Partial Motion to Dismiss Order.

The opening words of its complaint stress the importance of independent journalism for democracy - and the threat to the NYT's ability to provide that service by the use of its works to create AI products. It further highlights the role of copyright in protecting the output of news organisations, and their ability to produce high quality journalism.

The NYT website is noted in the Complaint as being the most highly represented proprietary source of data in the Common Crawl dataset, itself the most highly weighted dataset in GPT-3.

This complaint has been issued in the US District Court Southern District of New York by a number of regional and local newspapers (such as the New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune) and their publishers against OpenAI and Microsoft.

As with the complaint brought by The New York Times, examples are given of the GPT LLMs having 'memorised' copies of training data, as well as alleged hallucinations.  The complaint is for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement (including in relation to end users, to the extent end users are liable as direct infringers), removal of copyright management information, common law unfair competition by misappropriation, trade mark dilution (in branding outputs generated by OpenAI's GPT-based products), and dilution and injury to business reputation.  

OpenAI and Microsoft filed Motions to dismiss the ancillary claims (but not the core issue of whether using copyrighted content to train a generative AI model is fair use). The case has been consolidated with The New York Times and The Center for Investigative Reporting complaints. As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

Describing themselves as a 'rare breed in America' in terms of providing local news coverage, the Plaintiffs cite the new threat posed to them by GenAI products.  But, they also stress that this is not a battle between new and old technology but one that is based on alleged use of copyrighted newspaper content, without their consent and without what they see as fair payment.  

The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) has brought a complaint against OpenAI and Microsoft in the US District Court Southern District of New York. The CIR, founded in 1976, describes itself as the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US, reporting investigative stories about under-represented voices (its brands are Mother Jones, Reveal and CIR Studios). It alleges that tens of thousands of its articles have been copied as part of the training process of the Defendants' products, and that they memorize/regurgitate material or abridge it unlawfully.

The Complaint alleges direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and DMCA violations. 

OpenAI and Microsoft have filed Motions to Dismiss various of the claims. These include the claims under the DMCA alleging that Microsoft removed copyright infringement information from CIR's works or distributed works with the copyright management information (CMI) removed. They have also filed to dismiss the claim for contributory copyright infringement. In its Motion to Dismiss, OpenAI also seeks to dismiss the count of copyright infringement to the extent it relies upon CIR's 'novel' claim relating to 'abridgments' of CIR's copyrighted works. It argues that this claim should fail as, to constitute an infringing derivative work, an 'abridgment' must do more than just recite facts about an existing work, i.e., it would have to reprise the original's protected expression.

The case has been consolidated with the other newspaper claims, brought by The New York Times and Daily News. As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

CIR notes that the Defendants greatly benefit from its distinct voice in the marketplace as an investigative news outlet  – if the Defendants were limited to a more homogenous dataset, their LLMs would be "stunted in growth and power".

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court Southern District of New York by news organization The Intercept Media against OpenAI and Microsoft for breaches of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including relating to removal of copyright management information (CMI).

In November 2024, Microsoft's Motion to Dismiss was granted in full and with prejudice, whereas certain claims against OpenAI relating to removal of CMI have been allowed to proceed. 

As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

The Plaintiff has filed a Second Amended Complaint to add additional claims.

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court Southern District of New York by news organisation U.S. News & World Report. The complaint focuses on copyright and trademark infringements, as well as other federal and state statutes but identifies a number of differences with the other news related cases including: (1) the plaintiff also publishes comprehensive rankings such as academic and healthcare rankings, (2) its usnews.com website operates as a portal to other content and it therefore receives revenue from advertisers and affiliates, (3) it has developed a popular and unique brand in relation to its rankings, (4) use of its content is subject to a field-of-use licence which allows use of its content only for "noncommercial, personal use".

The complaint is for copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, removal of copyright management information, trademark infringement, trademark counterfeiting, false designation of origin and dilution of trademarks, and dilution and injury to business reputation.

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court Southern District of New York by nine regional newspapers against OpenAI and Microsoft.

The complaint is for copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and removal of copyright management information.

This Complaint has been brought by the publisher of the Chicago Tribune in the US District Court Southern District of New York against Perplexity AI in relation to its 'answer engine'. The complaint was followed one day later by one brought by The New York Times (see below) and adds to the complaints brought against Perplexity. The complaint is for copyright infringement (arising from (1) Perplexity's acquisition of the Chicago Tribune's copyrighted works to create 'inputs' and (2) copying of the Chicago Tribune's copyrighted works to create 'outputs' to user queries), contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, false designation of origin and dilution of the Chicago Tribune's trademarks, and trademark infringement.  The trademark claims focus on false attribution of hallucinations.  The complaint also features illustrative examples of outputs that are said to be identical or substantially similar to the Chicago Tribune's content.

This complaint has been brought by The New York Times in the US District Court Southern District of New York against Perplexity, the latest complaint relating to its 'answer engine'.  The complaint was issued one day after the complaint brought by the Chicago Tribune (see above). The complaint is for copyright infringement (based on (1) Perplexity's acquisition of The Times's copyrighted works to create 'inputs' for its GenAI products and (2) its copying of The Times's copyrighted works to create 'outputs' to user queries), contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, false designation of origin and dilution of The Times's trademarks, and trademark infringement.  As with prior complaints, the trademark claims focus on false attribution of hallucinations.  The complaint also features illustrative examples of outputs that are said to be identical or substantially similar to Times content.

This complaint has been filed in the US District Court Southern District of New York by Dow Jones and NYP Holdings (corporate parent, News Corporation), the publishers of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, against Perplexity, which is described in the complaint as a platform that allows users to access up to date news and information by 'skipping the links' to the original publishers' websites. The complaint focuses on both the input stage, and also the outputs of Perplexity's products, arguing that sometimes Perplexity's answers contain full or partial verbatim reproductions of the Plaintiffs' copyrighted articles. The complaint also highlights that Perplexity allegedly generates made-up text in its outputs and attributes that text to the Plaintiffs' publications using Plaintiffs' trade marks, which is argued to be likely to cause dilution by blurring/tarnishment.

The claim is for copyright infringement (arising out of Perplexity's alleged copying of the copyrighted works to create inputs for its RAG Index and to generate outputs to user queries) and false designation of origin and dilution of trade marks.

The Plaintiffs have filed a Second Amended Complaint with a number of amendments, including in relation to jurisdiction and venue. On 21 August 2025, the Court denied Perplexity's Motion for lack of jurisdiction and improper venue in full, finding that it had personal jurisdiction over the Defendant with respect to all of the claims and that were no grounds to order a transfer. 

This complaint has been brought by the Plaintiffs (household names providing researched content and language information) against Perplexity in the US District Court, Southern District of New York. The Complaint is for copyright infringement at the curation, inputs and outputs stages, and also for false designation of origin and dilution of trade marks in relation to outputs containing hallucinations.

The Plaintiffs argue that Perplexity's "answer machine" "free rides on [their] investment by cannibalizing traffic to Plaintiffs' websites with AI-generated summaries of Plaintiffs' own content". By doing so, it eliminates clicks on their websites and "starves web publishers of revenue".

Perplexity has filed a Motion to Dismiss certain of the copyright claims relating to direct infringement arguing that they do not plausibly allege direct infringement for Perplexity Answer Engine Outputs.

Reddit has brought proceedings against Perplexity AI and several co-defendants, alleging "industrial scale unlawful circumvention of data protections" to obtain copyrighted content from Reddit's platform. The Complaint alleges that, whilst some of Perplexity's competitors have entered into licensing agreements with Reddit, the defendants have instead circumvented Reddit's and Google's anti-scraping measures, including by going so far as disguising web scrapers as regular users. Perplexity is alleged to be a customer of the other defendants, purchasing the scraped Reddit data to train its AI tools. Reddit claims this causes reputational damage (as users trust their content stays within Reddit), lost licensing revenue, and increased security costs. 

The Complaint contains six counts, including circumvention of technical control measures under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unfair competition, unjust enrichment, and civil conspiracy. Reddit seeks injunctive relief and damages. This is Reddit's second major lawsuit of this nature in 2025, having also sued Anthropic. In response to the allegations, Perplexity has posted a response directly on Reddit to address the "Reddit Community" (Our Response to Reddit’s Lawsuit : r/perplexity_ai)

This complaint, brought by two news organisations in the US District Court Southern District of New York, is unusual because it does not include claims for copyright infringement. Instead, it alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in that thousands of the Plaintiffs' works were included in training sets with the author, title, and copyright infringement removed.

On 7 November 2024, Justice McMahon granted OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss the complaint that removal of copyright management information (CMI) prior to training ChatGPT is a violation of Section 1202(b)(i) of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act for which the Plaintiffs are entitled to damages and/or injunctive relief. The Court agreed with OpenAI that the Plaintiffs lacked Article III standing to pursue the relief sought, in that the Plaintiffs had not shown that they had suffered concrete harm.

It was noteworthy that this case did not include copyright infringement claims. As the Judge points out what was 'really at stake' was not exclusion of CMI from the Defendants' training sets, but the Defendants' use of the Plaintiffs' articles to develop ChatGPT without compensation to the Plaintiffs, but that was not the question before the Court. 

Raw Story and Alternet have appealed the decision relating to whether they have standing to pursue violations of the DMCA for removal of copyright management information to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Following other class actions brought by authors against OpenAI, this case is particularly significant for a number of reasons. First, one of the plaintiffs includes The Authors Guild, alongside 17 well-known Authors Guild members such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Jonathan Franzen, George RR Martin, David Baldacci and Scott Turow. Secondly, unlike the other claims, this one was brought in the Southern District of New York. Thirdly, whilst there is overlap in relation to the claims (in relation to direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement), other claims that have featured in the other cases against OpenAI have not been included.

As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

The Complaint tackles the question of 'fair use' head on noting that there is "nothing fair" about what OpenAI has done, adding that its "unauthorized use of Plaintiffs' copyrighted works thus presents a straightforward infringement case applying well-established law to well-recognized copyright harms".  

The Class Action Plaintiffs (including a number of renowned authors and The Authors' Guild) have filed a consolidated Complaint. The Complaint is for copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and contributory infringement.

This complaint is brought by a number of authors, on their own behalf and on behalf of a class against OpenAI and Microsoft, in the US District Court Southern District of New York. The claim is for infringement in the training of OpenAI and Microsoft's GPT models, as well as for contributory infringement by certain of the defendants.

As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

The Complaint's opening paragraph stated that "the basis of the OpenAI platform is nothing less than the rampant theft of copyrighted works".  The Complaint also noted that it asked ChatGPT if one of the authors' work had been included in its training data to which it answered "Yes, Julian Sancton's book 'Madhouse at the End of the Earth' is included in my training data". 

This case has now been consolidated with Authors Guild v OpenAI (see Authors Guild entry for further updates).

This class action complaint has been brought by two non-fiction authors/journalists against Microsoft and OpenAI in the US District Court Southern District of New York. The Complaint makes reference to that of the New York Times and is for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, and contributory copyright infringement.

As noted above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

This class action claim has been brought by two authors as individual and representative Plaintiffs against OpenAI relating to its ChatGPT large language model (LLM). The claim has been brought in the US District Court for the Northern District of California (Mona Awad voluntarily applied for the dismissal of their claim on 11 August 2023).

The Plaintiffs allege that, during the training process of its LLMs, OpenAI copied "at least Plaintiff Tremblay’s book The Cabin at the End of the World; and Plaintiff Awad’s books 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl and Bunny" without their permission. Further, they argue that "because the OpenAI Language Models cannot function without the expressive information extracted from Plaintiffs’ works (and others) and retained inside them, the OpenAI Language Models are themselves infringing derivative works, made without Plaintiffs’ permission and in violation of their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act". The Complaint also notes that, when prompted, ChatGPT generates summaries of the Plaintiffs' works.

Of particular relevance in this case is the datasets which OpenAI used in training its GPT models (with OpenAI having confirmed it had used datasets called Books1 and Books2 though it has not revealed the contents of those datasets).

In addition to direct and vicarious copyright infringement, the class action alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, unjust enrichment, violations of the California and common law unfair competition laws, and negligence.

In an order of 12 February 2024, the Court dismissed a number of claims in the Complaint, but with leave to amend in relation to the claim to vicarious infringement and the copyright management information (CMI) claim.  

The First Consolidated Amended Complaint filed by the Plaintiffs alleges direct infringement and unfair competition. OpenAI has filed its Answer to the complaint, and also applied to dismiss the unfair competition claim. The Plaintiffs are seeking leave to file a Second Amended Consolidated Complaint to include new causes of action based on evidence produced in discovery (including relating to DMCA claims, CDAFA/CFAA, conversion, larceny, breach of contract, unjust enrichment/UCL, the Sherman Act), and also to add Microsoft Corporation as a Defendant.

The case has been consolidated with the Silverman and Chabon actions against OpenAI. As noted in The New York Times entry above, 12 cases relating to OpenAI and Microsoft have been centralized in the Southern District of New York.

As Open AI puts it in its Reply document, "the issue at the heart of this litigation is whether training artificial intelligence to understand human knowledge violates copyright law. It is on that question that the parties fundamentally disagree, and on which the future of artificial intelligence may turn".

This case has now been consolidated with Tremblay v OpenAI – see Tremblay entry for future updates.

Comedian Sarah Silverman, and other Plaintiffs as individual and representative plaintiffs have brought proceedings against OpenAI relating to ChatGPT in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Plaintiffs allege that, during the training process of its LLMs, OpenAI copied "at least Plaintiff Silverman’s book The Bedwetter; Plaintiff Golden’s book Ararat; and Plaintiff Kadrey’s book Sandman Slime." without Plaintiffs' permission. Further, it is argued that "because the OpenAI Language Models cannot function without the expressive information extracted from Plaintiffs’ works (and others) and retained inside them, the OpenAI Language Models are themselves infringing derivative works, made without Plaintiffs’ permission and in violation of their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act".

In addition to direct and vicarious copyright infringement, the class action alleges violations of the DMCA, unjust enrichment, violations of the California and common law unfair competition laws, and negligence.

In an order of 12 February 2024, the Court dismissed a number of claims in the Complaint, but with leave to amend in relation to the claim to vicarious infringement and the copyright management information (CMI) claim (the claim to direct infringement was not included in the motion to dismiss).  

This case has now been consolidated with Tremblay v OpenAI – see Tremblay entry for future updates.

This claim has been brought in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by a group of authors, playwrights and screenwriters (on both an individual and representative basis), including Pulitzer Prize winning author for fiction, Michael Chabon.

As with the other claims against OpenAI, the claims include direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA, violations of California unfair competition law, negligence and unjust enrichment.  

This class action complaint has been brought in the US District Court Northern District of California by three individual authors against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Plaintiffs are authors of text materials including articles, essays and other written works. The complaint is for direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, unfair competition, violation of the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA), violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), conversion, unjust enrichment/quasi-contract, breach of contract as a third party beneficiary, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), larceny/receipt of stolen property and Sherman Act – conspiracy to restrain trade.

This is a further complaint brought by Disney and a number of other studios, this time against Chinese company MiniMax, which operates Hailuo AI, an AI image and video generating service. The complaint has been brought in the US District Court, Central District of California and is for direct copyright infringement (arising out of acts of developing and training the Hailuo AI service and also in the outputs that MiniMax generates for subscribers). In the alternative, if MiniMax pleads that it is not the direct infringer but that its own subscribers are, the complaint pleads that it is nevertheless liable for secondary copyright infringement.

The Complaint states that Hailuo "pirates and plunders Plaintiffs' copyrighted works on a massive scale", with its marketing as a "Hollywood studio in your pocket" being "an audacious self-anointed nickname given that MiniMax built its business from intellectual property stolen from Hollywood studios like Plaintiffs".

This Complaint has been brought by Warner Bros. Discovery (comprising Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., DC Comics, Turner Entertainment Co., Hanna-Barbera Productions, Inc., and The Cartoon Network, Inc.) in the US District Court for the Central District of California, against Midjourney Inc. The plaintiffs are owners of "some of the most popular and valuable fictional characters ever created" including Superman, Batman & Bugs Bunny. Their complaint is for direct and, in the alternative, for secondary copyright infringement. The plaintiffs argue that Midjourney was trained to output infringing content, and that its display and distribution of their copyright works is pervasive and a clear draw for its subscribers. The complaint also focuses on arguments that Midjourney does not take reasonable measures to prevent further copyright infringement (and indeed is alleged to have removed even imperfect protections).

This complaint against Midjourney follows the complaint brought by Disney and Universal in June 2025, as well as an earlier complaint brought by various visual artists. The case has been consolidated with Disney's complaint.

Disney and Universal have issued proceedings against image generator Midjourney in the US District Court of the Central District of California. The claim is for direct and secondary infringement and relates to Midjourney's AI image generating service which the Complaint describes as "a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney's and Universal's copyrighted works". It goes on to describe Midjourney as "the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism". The Complaint exhibits pre-action correspondence from the Plaintiffs in which they sought to ask Midjourney to at least implement technological measures to prevent generation of infringing material – but, it describes, instead Midjourney 'doubled down', releasing newer versions of its image service and teasing a video service.

The Complaint is replete with images of Disney and Universal IP assets, and outputs produced by using Midjourney which the Plaintiffs argue have been reproduced, generated, publicly displayed and distributed by Midjourney, noting research that indicates that it generates such infringing images even when the prompt does not ask it for Plaintiffs' specific characters. It also argues that Midjourney publicly displays copies of Plaintiffs' characters on its 'Explore' page which allows users to search various images previously generated by Midjourney for other subscribers.  

In its Answer to the Complaint, as well as focusing on the merits around its fair use arguments, Midjourney notes that the Plaintiffs have, themselves, also benefited from Midjourney and other similar GenAI tools – arguing that they "cannot have it both ways". It also focuses on its argument that the Midjourney platform is an instrument for expression by users and that it assists only in the creation of images at the direction of its users and guided by their instructions. Meanwhile, it argues, the Plaintiffs could have, but did not, avail themselves of Midjourney's DMCA notice and takedown procedures.

The case has been consolidated with the complaint brought by Warner Bros.

This class-action brought in the US District Court for the Northern District of California targets both Copilot and OpenAI's Codex tool, which provides the technology underlying Copilot. 

The complaint (as originally filed) focuses on four key areas:

• An allegation that Copilot violates provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by ingesting and distributing code snippets (copyrighted information) without including the licence terms, copyright notice and author attribution.
• An allegation that, by not complying with open licence notices, Copilot breaches the conditions of such licences by which the original code had been made available to Copilot/Codex.
• An allegation that Copilot passes off code as an original creation and therefore GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI have been unjustly enriched by Copilot's subscription based service. This is a claim for unlawful competition.
• An allegation that Github violates the Class's rights under the Californian Privacy Act, Github Privacy Statement and/or the Californian Constitution by inter alia sharing the Class's sensitive personal information; creating a product that contains personal data GitHub cannot delete, alter nor share with the applicable Class member; and selling the Class's personal data.

On 3 January 2024, the Court granted GitHub's motions to dismiss in part. The Judge held that the state law claims of intentional and negligent interference with prospective economic relations, unjust enrichment, negligence and unfair competition were pre-empted by the Copyright Act. The claims under the DCMA were also dismissed with leave to amend.

On 24 June 2024, the Court made an order granting in part the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss in relation to the remaining claims in the Second Amended Complaint. The Court dismissed the DMCA complaint (with prejudice) and the complaint for unjust enrichment and punitive damages.  However, it allowed the Plaintiffs' breach of contract claim for violation of open-source licenses to proceed.

The Plaintiff's petition for permission to appeal has been granted by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In their opening brief, the Appellants describe the case as a 'heartland DMCA case' in that the Defendants copied the Plaintiffs' computer code in their entirety and stripped those digital files of their copyright management information in order to train Copilot. The appeal is based on the finding of the District Court that the complaint related to generation of 'near-identical copies' as opposed to 'identical' copies i.e., as to whether the identicality requirement is correct. In its response brief, Microsoft describes the Plaintiffs as "five pseudonymous detractors who raced into court to become the first to challenge an LLM". It argues that they lack Article III standing, and that the claims fail on the merits.

This class action was brought in the US District Court Northern District of California by an initially anonymised group (comprising an author/journalist, as well as users of Gmail/Google search engines etc including some minors, and users of social media services) against Alphabet Inc, Google Deepmind and Google LLC, in July 2023 in relation to the training of Bard (now Gemini) and other Google AI products. The claim is now proceeding only against Google LLC. The original Complaint alleged violation of competition laws, negligence, invasion of privacy, intrusion upon inclusion, larceny/receipt of stolen property, conversion, unjust enrichment, direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement and violation of the DMCA.  

Following the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss the Complaint, the Plaintiffs filed an Amended Complaint in which they made a number of changes to the complaint, including adding new causes of action. In relation to the copyright claims, they removed the vicarious copyright infringement and DMCA claims and revised the direct infringement claim to allege that "Bard's outputs were necessarily derivative" of the Plaintiffs' works (including the work of the author Jill Leovy) used to train the model. 

On 6 June 2024, the Court granted Google's motion to dismiss with leave to amend. On 27 June 2024, the Plaintiffs filed their Second Amended Complaint which comprises solely a claim for direct copyright infringement. The Complaint relates how Gemini was initially built on the LaMDA LLM – with certain of the data used to train LaMDA coming from the C4 dataset which contains copyrighted materials.

The case has been consolidated with Zhang v Google and named In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation. A consolidated complaint was filed in December 2024, bringing in new Plaintiffs. The Court has granted the Order to strike the class allegations with leave to amend.

On 11 September 2025, the Court granted in part the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss, without leave to amend. The Court found that the Plaintiffs had failed to plausibly allege direct copyright infringement as to various AI models referenced in the Complaint (Codey, Chirp, Veo, MedLM, LearnLM, SecLM, Gemma, CodeGemma, RecurrentGemma, and PaliGemma). It had also dismissed its vicarious infringement claims against Alphabet. However, the Court also found that the Plaintiffs had plausibly alleged direct copyright infringement in relation to PaLM, GLaM, LaMDA, Bard, Gemini and Imagen.

The Plaintiffs have filed a redacted Motion to certify a class, which Google has opposed. Google has also moved for an order sanctioning Plaintiffs by striking the class allegations from the Second Amended Consolidated Complaint.

This class action complaint has been brought by a number of visual artists against Google (and its parent company Alphabet) in relation to its text-to-image diffusion models Imagen (announced in May 2022 but not immediately released to the public), Imagen 2 (released in December 2023) and multi-modal models trained on both images and text (such as Google Gemini). The complaint is (only) for direct copyright infringement against Google and vicarious copyright infringement against Alphabet.  The complaint is based on an argument that the key source of Google's training data is the LAION image datasets.

The Defendants filed a Motion to Dismiss in relation to works not named in the complaint, or not validly registered; the copyright infringement claim based on the theory that the Defendants' AI models are an infringing derivative work; and the vicarious infringement claim against Alphabet in its entirety.

The case has been consolidated with Leovy v Google  and named In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation (see above for updates).

Plaintiffs brought a class action against Meta relating to its LLaMA (Large Language Model Meta AI) product in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The claim notes Meta's statements that LLaMa was trained using books including from the Books3 section of ThePile dataset (assembled from content available in 'shadow library' websites (including Bibliotik)), which the Plaintiffs contend includes their copyright works.

The claims (as originally drafted) included direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA, violations of California unfair competition law, negligence and unjust enrichment. 

On Thursday 9 November 2023, US District Judge Vince Chhabria indicated that he would grant Meta's motion to dismiss the claims that content generated by Meta's LLaMA tool infringes copyright (and also that LLaMA is itself an infringing work), but would give the plaintiffs permission to amend most of their claim.

The claim has been consolidated with that brought by a number of authors including Michael Chabon, and also with the Huckabee action against Meta which has been transferred from the US District Court for the Southern District of New York to the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

In December 2024, the Plaintiffs filed a Motion to file a Third Amended Consolidated Complaint, which was granted in January 2025. The Plaintiffs brought the Motion on the basis that Meta had produced "some of the most incriminating internal documents it has produced to date" shortly before the end of the discovery deadline. The Third Amended Consolidated complaint included new claims under the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act and DMCA, as well as copyright infringement claims relating to seeding of the Plaintiffs' works during an alleged process by Meta of torrenting pirated files from the LibGen dataset.

On 7 March 2025, Judge Chhabria granted Meta's Motion to Dismiss in relation to the CDAFA (California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act) claim but denied the Motion as to the DMCA claim relating to removal of copyright management information, finding that the Plaintiffs had alleged a sufficient injury for Article III standing. On 10 March 2025, the Plaintiffs filed a Motion for Partial Summary Judgment on direct copyright infringement and on the ground that Meta's "initial acquisition of millions of pirated works cannot be fair use". 

Meta responded to the Motion for Partial Summary Judgment and itself sought summary judgment that its copying of the Plaintiffs' works to develop and train LLMs is fair use and on the DMCA claim. A number of amicus curiae briefs were filed in support of both parties' arguments on the summary judgment motions.

On 25 June 2025, Judge Chhabria issued his order on fair use in favour of Meta. Whilst he denied the Plaintiffs' motion for partial summary judgment, and granted Meta's cross-motion, the discussion re fair use is more nuanced than that outcome would suggest. The Judge found that Meta's use of the works was highly transformative which meant that the plaintiffs needed to win decisively on the fourth fair use factor, market dilution, in order to win on fair use. On this point, the Judge noted that "in cases involving use like Meta's, it seems the plaintiffs will often win, at least where those cases have better-developed records on the market effects of the defendant's use. No matter how transformative LLM training may be, it's hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books". He also suggested that some markets (eg news articles) might be even more vulnerable to indirect competition from AI outputs. However, in other situations, there may be fair use, including where the plaintiffs are unlikely to face meaningful competition from AI-generated ones.

The Judge concluded that because the issue of market dilution was so important, if the plaintiffs had presented evidence on this that could be used by a jury to decide in their favour on this issue, this aspect of the case would have to go forward to a jury. However, because they had not done so, he decided the fair use arguments in favour of Meta.

It is also worth noting that the Judge disagreed with the opinion expressed by Judge Alsup in the Bartz v Anthropic summary judgment decision (see further below) and his heavy focus on the transformative nature of generative AI, describing him as "brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on", criticising also Judge Alsup's analogy of using the works for "training schoolchildren to write well".

Given the finding on fair use, the Court also dismissed the Plaintiffs' DMCA claim as Meta's removal of CMI could not have furthered an act of infringement. The Court must now consider how to deal with the remaining part of the infringement action relating to uploading of pirated copies of the Plaintiffs' copyrighted material via a peer-to-peer file sharing network.

Kadrey has sought leave to file a Fourth Amended Complaint which seeks to address further details relating to torrenting by Meta, add a contributory infringement claim, revise the class definition and add three wholly-owned loan-out companies as additional plaintiffs.

This case has been consolidated with Kadrey v Meta – follow that case for updates

The same set of authors, playwrights and screenwriters in proceedings against OpenAI have also brought a claim against Meta in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.  This case focuses on Meta's LLaMa (Large Language Model Meta AI) and noted Meta's statements that LLaMa was trained using books including from the Books3 section of ThePile dataset (assembled from content available in 'shadow library' websites (including Bibliotik)), which the Plaintiffs contended includes their copyright works.

The claims include direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA, violations of California unfair competition law, negligence and unjust enrichment. 

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court Northern District of California San Francisco Division by a fiction author, Christopher Farnsworth, against Meta relating to its LLaMa tools, which were trained using books including from the Books 3 section of The Pile data set, which the Plaintiff argues included his works. The complaint is for copyright infringement.

The complaint has been consolidated with the Kadrey v Meta proceedings (follow Kadrey v Meta for updates).

This complaint against Meta has been brought by a publisher, Entrepreneur, in the US District Court Northern District of California San Francisco Division. The complaint includes a claim based on the alleged downloading of copies from Shadow Libraries.  The complaint is for direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and violation of the DMCA. The complaint alleges that Meta pirated "at least hundreds of" its copyrighted works and that, as a result, Entrepreneur's digital book sales have declined.

This complaint has been brought by two Plaintiffs in the US District Court for the Northern District of California San Francisco Division, against Meta. The Plaintiffs are the owners of "award-winning, critically acclaimed adult motion pictures" who say that their works have been infringed by Meta on a grand scale, with Meta using the BitTorrent protocol to commit "rampant copyright infringement" through downloading the Plaintiffs' works and engaging in distribution of those works to others. In total, the Plaintiffs argue that Meta has infringed at least 2,396 of their movies. It appears that the Plaintiffs were alerted to this potential infringement by evidence in the Kadrey v Meta case about Meta's activities. The complaint is for direct copyright infringement and secondary copyright infringement.

This is the first GenAI complaint brought by the adult entertainment industry.

Meta has filed a Motion to Dismiss for failure to plausibly allege that Meta is liable for direct, vicarious or contributory infringement, noting that the premise of the complaint is that persons acting under Meta's direction allegedly downloaded copies of Plaintiffs' adult films to train generative AI video models. Meta argues that the Plaintiffs have gone "to great lengths to stitch together this narrative together with guesswork and innuendo".

This is a case brought against Stability AI (and other AI tools such as Midjourney), this time by a group of visual artists acting as individual and representative plaintiffs. The claim was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Plaintiffs have filed for copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act violations, and related state law claims. They allege that the Defendants used their (and other artists’) works to train Stable Diffusion without obtaining their permission. According to the Plaintiffs, when the Defendants’ AI tools create "new images" based entirely on the training images, they are creating an infringing derivative work.

The Plaintiffs seek to bring their suit as a class action on behalf of "millions of artists" in the U.S. that own a copyright in any work that was used to train any version of the AI tools. 

On 30 October 2023, Judge Orrick's order was published, dismissing parts of the claim. However, the Plaintiffs were given leave to amend, with the Judge requiring them to clarify their infringement claims. Stability AI's motion to dismiss the claim against it for direct copyright infringement was denied.

On 29 November 2023, the Plaintiffs filed their Amended Complaint, which included a number of new plaintiffs joining the complaint.

On 8 February 2024, Judge Orrick denied the Defendants' motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) statute which had been directed solely at the Plaintiffs' right of publicity claims, on the basis that the Complaint and Amended Complaint fell within the anti-SLAPP statute's public interest exception.

On 12 August 2024, Judge Orrick issued a ruling in which he confirmed the following:

• The allegations of direct and induced copyright infringement were sufficient to proceed. The Plaintiffs alleged that Stable Diffusion is built to a significant extent on copyrighted works and that the way the product operates necessarily invokes copies or protected elements of those works. The plausible inferences were that Stable Diffusion by operation by end users creates copyright infringement and was created to facilitate that infringement by design.
• All DMCA claims were dismissed with prejudice (including in line with the opinion of Judge Tigar in Doe I v GitHub, Inc).
• The claims for unjust enrichment were dismissed but the Plaintiffs were given leave to make one last attempt to state an unjust enrichment claim.
• Midjourney's Motion to Dismiss false endorsement and trade dress claims was denied.
• The breach of contract claim against DeviantArt was dismissed with prejudice.

On 31 October 2024, the Plaintiffs filed their Second Amended Complaint.

Having initially brought proceedings in the US District Court of Delaware against Stability AI (as well as proceedings in the UK, see below), Getty Images has now filed a complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Getty Images' complaint is for copyright infringement, providing false copyright management information, trademark infringement, unfair competition, trademark dilution, and related state law claims. Stability AI has filed a Motion to Dismiss a number of the claims. It describes the claims relating to providing false copyright management information, misuse of Getty's trademarks and unfair competition as "underbrush".

This case should be tracked alongside the action in the UK, though different issues may arise for consideration given potential divergences e.g., in relation to defences to copyright infringement.

Former Presidential Candidate and former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee and a group of other plaintiffs brought a class action against Meta, Bloomberg, Microsoft and The Eleutherai Institute in the United States District Court Southern District of New York. The complaint focuses on EleutherAI's dataset called 'The Pile' which includes in its data sources, 'Books 3', a dataset of a large collection (said to be approximately 18,000) of pirated ebooks. The complaint notes that The Pile, and specifically Books3, was a popular training data set for companies developing AI technology, including the Defendants in this case.

As in other cases, the complaint alleged direct copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, DCMA claims (removal of copyright management information), conversion, negligence, and unjust enrichment.

The Plaintiffs have since voluntarily dismissed the complaint against The Eleutherai Institute, and the complaints against Meta and Microsoft were severed and transferred to California. In the Amended Complaint filed in January 2024, the Plaintiffs withdrew their indirect copyright infringement, DCMA and state-law claims, leaving the direct copyright infringement claim to be argued. 

This is the first case involving Bloomberg, which the complaint notes launched the world's first LLM built from scratch for finance. The complaint notes that Bloomberg had stated that it would not use the Books3 dataset used to training future versions of BloombergGPT, but further notes that LLM training is iterative and builds on prior versions, with the Plaintiff's works 'baked in' already. 

On 24 November 2025, the Court denied Bloomberg's Motion to Dismiss in full. The Motion argued Plaintiffs failed to state a claim, in that it did not identify precisely which works were within Books3 and that the fair use defense applied. The Court found neither argument meritorious at the motion to dismiss stage. In particular, it would be futile to conduct a fair use analysis without a factual record.  

In 2020, Thomson Reuters sued Ross alleging that (after failing to agree a licence from Westlaw), Ross used so-called 'Bulk Memos' prepared by lawyers working on behalf of LegalEase Solutions which, it is alleged, were created using Westlaw headnotes (rather than the underlying judicial opinions themselves). Ross used the headnote content to train its machine learning model to create a competing product – so, the Ross tool does not generate new content but "spits back relevant judicial opinions that have already been written".

In a change of heart from a 2023 Memorandum Opinion, the Judge issued a new Memorandum Opinion in 2025, granting most of Thomson Reuters's motion for partial summary judgment on direct copyright infringement and related defences, and granting its motion for partial summary judgment on fair use.  Contrary to the previous Opinion, the Judge concluded that there was no genuine dispute that the relevant headnotes and Thomson Reuters's Key Number System met the originality threshold, both as a compilation of headnotes, and on an individual basis. The Court noted that a headnote can "introduce creativity by distilling, synthesising, or explaining part of an opinion". Further, there was actual copying and substantial similarity in relation to some 2,243 headnotes in the case. The Court also found that various defences relied upon by Ross failed.

Most significantly, Ross could not establish the fair use defence. The Court's findings on this aspect are of particular interest in the context of the various cases in the US concerning generative AI, where fair use defences are being run in relation to the training and development of those models. 

The Court decided as follows on the four factors in the fair use test: 

1. Purpose and character of Ross's use – this factor was in favour of Thomson Reuters. Ross's use was commercial and non-transformative, even though the copying occurred at an intermediate step (not as part of the final product Ross put forward to consumers): "Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to develop a competing legal research tool".
2. Nature of the original work – this factor was in favour of Ross. Westlaw's material had more than the required minimal spark of originality but it was not that creative.
3. How much of the work was used and how substantial a part relative to the whole – this factor was also in favour of Ross. Ross did not make Westlaw headnotes available to the public.
4. The most significant factor, how Ross's use affected the copyrighted work's value or potential market – this final factor, the most important, was in favour of Thomson Reuters. Ross meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute, and this also had an effect on a potential market for AI training data.

Balancing the factors, the Court granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters on fair use. There remain some issues that go forward to a jury trial but the Court's findings on fair use are particularly significant. On 4 April the judge certified the case for appeal – noting that whilst he "remained confident" in his summary judgment opinion, there were "substantial grounds for difference of opinion on controlling legal issues in this case". Accordingly, he has certified the following two questions to the Third Circuit for interlocutory appeal: (1) whether the West headnotes and West Key Number System are original; and (2) whether Ross's use of the headnotes was fair use.  

On 23 May 2025, Judge Bibas issued his Memorandum Opinion explaining why the case had been certified for interlocutory appellate review. Whilst he was still 'confident' in his summary judgment decision, he noted that the questions were 'hard'. The case qualified for review because there were controlling questions of law that presented substantial grounds for difference of opinion about the right answer so that an immediate appeal would material advance the ultimate termination of the litigation. However, the Opinion also explains why he stands behind his February 2025 opinion.

Permission to appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit was subsequently granted. In its Appellant's Brief, ROSS raises two issues: (1) is a short quote or paraphrase of a judicial holding copyrightable? (2) does the fair use doctrine protect ROSS's internal use of Westlaw's headnotes in memos that served as training data for an AI legal search engine that produced only non-infringing outputs? On the first point, ROSS argues they are not copyrightable as "no one can own the law". On the second point, it says its minimal use of the headnotes was "quintessential fair use", "radically promot[ing] scientific progress without impacting any market for those headnotes because no such market existed". In sum, it argues, the decision read copyrightability too broadly and fair use too narrowly.

A number of music publishers (comprising Concord, Universal and ABKCO) brought an action against Anthropic in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee Nashville Division (the case was ordered to be transferred to the United States District Court for the Northern District of California). The complaint was brought in order to "address the systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics" alleged to have taken place during the process of Anthropic building and operating its AI models referred to as 'Claude'.  In particular, the complaint notes that when a user prompts Claude to provide the lyrics to a particular song, its response will provide responses that contain all or significant portions of those lyrics. Further, when Clause is requested to write a song about a certain topic, the complaint alleges that this can involve reproduction of the publishers' copyrighted lyrics – for example, when asked to write a song "about the death of Buddy Holly", it responded by generating output that copies directly from the song "American Pie".

The complaint contains claims relating to direct copyright infringement, contributory infringement, vicarious infringement, and DCMA claims (removal of copyright management information).   

In its response to the Plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction, Anthropic argues that the Plaintiffs devised 'special attacks' in order to evade Claude's built-in guardrails and to generate alleged infringements through 'trial and error'. It also relies upon the use of copyrighted material as inputs as 'fair use'.

The Plaintiffs' preliminary injunction application was partially settled by Anthropic agreeing to maintain its already implemented guardrails in its current AI models and offerings (and will also apply them in a consistent manner to any new LLMs and new products). On 25 March 2025, the Court rejected the remaining part of the preliminary injunction application (relating to inputs), noting that the proposed injunction was "elusive and poorly defined" and that the "undefined nature of the relief sought .. casts a long shadow over [the Plaintiffs'] request."

On 26 March 2025, the Court granted Athropic's Motion to Dismiss with leave to amend.

Anthropic's Motion concerned the claims of contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement and removal/alteration of copyright management information. 

Concord filed an Amended Complaint comprising allegations of further infringements arising from third party uses of Claude, as well as relying upon evidence of Claude allegedly reproducing lyrics when unprompted to do so, and that Anthropic had knowledge of users' activity. It also alleged that when websites were scraped for data, Anthropic knowingly stripped CMI information and also used pre-built data sets which it knew had been stripped of CMI.

Anthropic's Motion to Dismiss the Amended Complaint in relation to the claims of contributory infringement, vicarious infringement and violation of the DMCA was denied. Following the summary judgment hearing in the Bartz case (see below), the Plaintiffs filed a Motion for Leave to File a Second Amended Complaint: (1) to update their existing allegations regarding Anthropic’s alleged unlawful reproduction of their works via downloading via BitTorrent; (2) to assert new claims against Anthropic for alleged unlawful distribution of the works; and (3) to include works that Anthropic are alleged to have downloaded and uploaded via BitTorrent. However, this has been denied.

This was the first case involving the music industry, and also the AI tool developer Anthropic. There are a number of websites which currently aggregate and publish music lyrics – however, this is through an existing licensing market by which the publishers license their copyrighted lyrics.

This class action was brought in the US District Court Northern District of California by three authors of fiction and non-fiction against Anthropic. The claim of copyright infringement relates to Anthropic's Claude model which is also the subject of proceedings brought by a number of record companies. The Plaintiffs allege that, whilst Anthropic has been 'particularly secretive' about the sources of its training corpus for Claude, it has admitted to using The Pile dataset.  Anthropic's Answer to the Complaint includes reliance on the defence of fair use, amongst other affirmative defences.

The complaint notes that it has been reported that Claude has been used to generate cheap book content with it being reported that one man had "written" (their use of quotation marks) 97 books in less than a year using Claude (as well as ChatGPT).

Anthropic filed a Motion for Summary Judgment on all claims on the basis that its use of the Plaintiffs' works is a fair use under section 107 of the Copyright Act. 

On 23 June 2025, Judge Alsup issued his Order on fair use. He ruled in favour of Anthropic that its use of books to train Claude training (which included purchasing millions of copyrighted books, removing the bindings and scanning every page before storing them in digitised, searchable files) was a fair use, and that the print-to-digital format change was also a fair use. The Judge found that the use of books to train Claude was "exceedingly transformative". He was not supportive of the authors' arguments on the effect of the use on the market. In particular, he noted that their complaint was no different than if they were complaining that training schoolchildren to write well would "result in an explosion of competing works". However, he denied Anthropic summary judgment in relation to its acts of downloading millions of copyrighted books in digital form from pirate sites on the internet for its central library – this did not amount to fair use. 

The court subsequently certified a Pirated Books Class relating to beneficial or legal copyright owners of the right to reproduce copies of any books in the versions of LibGen or PiLiMi downloaded by Anthropic, the trial of which was due to take place on 1 December 2025. Anthropic applied for a stay of the case, including the December trial (which it noted exposed it to potentially billions of dollars in liability), on the grounds that it would seek interlocutory appeal of the class certification pursuant to Rule 23(f) Federal Rules of Procedure (subsequently filed by Anthropic) and because it had already petitioned Judge Alsup to grant leave to file an interlocutory appeal of his decision finding its use of pirated books libraries was not fair use. On 11 August 2025, Judge Alsup denied the motion for a stay. His order contains a number of interesting comments.  He describes Anthropic as refusing "to come clean…even now" on which works in its collection were actually used to train LLMs and why they were all retained. Further, in response to Anthropic's argument that it will confront business-threatening injury, he comments "…if Anthropic loses big it will because what it did wrong was also big".

Following a flurry of activity relating to Anthropic's Petition for Permission to Appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and for a stay, the parties reached a settlement in principle which has now been preliminarily approved by the Court, after the parties answered an extensive list of clarificatory questions from the Court, as being fair, reasonable and adequate (but remains subject to a Final Approval Hearing anticipated for April 2026, after the claims process has completed). The settlement of at least $1.5 billion dollars (plus interest) will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, with around 500,000 works in the class amounting to an estimated gross recovery of $3,000 per class work. 

This action has been brought in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York by a group of major record companies against the company behind Udio, a generative AI service launched in April 2024 by a team of former researchers from Google Deepmind.  Udio allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts or audio files. As with the complaint against Suno (see below), the Plaintiffs rely on tests comprising targeted prompts including the characteristics of popular sound recordings – such as the decade of release, the topic, genre and descriptions of the artist. They allege that using these prompts caused Udio's product to generate music files strongly resembling copyrighted recordings. For example, using the prompt "my tempting 1964 girl smokey sing hitsville soul pop" and excerpting lyrics from the band The Temptations led to Udio generating a digital music file called "Sunshine Melody" which would allegedly be instantly recognised as resembling the song "My Girl". 

The claim is for direct copyright infringement.

In its Answer to the Complaint, Udio highlights the fact that the Plaintiffs do not allege that outputs generated by Udio infringe copyright. Whilst it accepts that the "many recordings that Udio was trained on presumably included recording whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs" it argues that copies used in the training process, given that they are "never seen or heard by anyone", are not infringing. This is because it is argued to be "quintessential fair use" to copy the Plaintiffs' works as part of the process of developing a new technology in the service of creating an ultimately non-infringing new product. Udio further argues that the Plaintiffs, comprising major labels, have an aversion to competition but that "no owns musical styles".  

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a press release in relation to the claims brought against both Udio and Suno. Noting that the music community has embraced AI, the RIAA argues that unlicensed services set back "the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all".  Both complaints seek to deal head on with the likely claim of fair use:  “[The services] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.”

In its response to the Answers to the Complaint filed by Udio and Suno, the RIAA issued a statement on X highlighting the "major concession" in relation to "massive unlicensed copying of artists' recordings" and rejecting the reliance on fair use as a defence.

UMG was granted leave to amend its Complaint to include a cause of action relating to circumvention of technological measures under the DMCA, arising out of allegations that Udio had engaged in illegal scraping of copyrighted sound recordings from YouTube. Udio has filed a Motion to Dismiss this complaint.

UMG, Capitol Records and Warner have settled with Udio, but the complaints brought by Sony continue.

This action has been brought in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts by a group of major record companies against the company behind Suno, a generative AI service launched in July 2023.  Suno allows users to create digital music files based on text prompts. As with the complaint against Udio, the Plaintiffs rely on tests comprising targeted prompts including the characteristics of popular sound recordings – such as the decade of release, the topic, genre and descriptions of the artist. They allege that using these prompts caused Suno's product to generate music files strongly resembling copyrighted recordings. For example, Suno's service has generated 29 different outputs that contain the style of Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" – using the prompt "1950s rock and roll, rhythm & blues, 12 bar blues, rockabilly, energetic male vocalist, singer guitarist" and the lyrics from the original, one output titled "Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orle" replicates the highly distinctive rhythm of the original's chorus, and uses the same melodic shape on the phrases "go Johnny, go, go".

The claim is for direct copyright infringement.

As with the Udio Complaint, in its Answer to the Complaint, Suno highlights the fact that the Plaintiffs do not allege that outputs generated by Suno infringe copyright.  Whilst it notes that "it is no secret that the tens of millions of recordings that Suno's model was trained on presumably included recordings whose rights are owned by the Plaintiffs in this case" it also argues that copies used in the training process, given that they are "never seen or heard by anyone", are not infringing. This is because it is argued to be "quintessential fair use" to use a back-end technological process, invisible to the public, in creating "an ultimately non-infringing new product". Suno also argues that the Plaintiffs, comprising major labels, have an aversion to competition but that "no owns musical styles".  

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) issued a press release in relation to the claims brought against both Udio and Suno. Noting that the music community has embraced AI, the RIAA argues that unlicensed services set back "the promise of genuinely innovative AI for us all".  Both complaints seek to deal head on with the likely claim of fair use:  “[The services] cannot avoid liability for [their] willful copyright infringement by claiming fair use. The doctrine of fair use promotes human expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain, limited circumstances, but [the services] offe[r] imitative machine-generated music—not human creativity or expression.”

In its response to the Answers to the Complaint filed by Udio and Suno, the RIAA issued a statement on X highlighting the "major concession" in relation to "massive unlicensed copying of artists' recordings" and rejecting the reliance on fair use as a defence. In relation to the argument that the "apparent attempts to misuse the tool to generate renditions of pre-existing songs" is "unrepresentative of what real people do with Suno", the RIAA notes that in a presentation to venture capitalists, its co-founder was shown on video using "Hendrix" as a prompt.  

UMG wishes to amend its Complaint to include a cause of action relating to circumvention of technological measures under the DMCA, arising out of allegations that Udio had engaged in illegal scraping of copyrighted sound recordings from YouTube.

Suno and Warner have settled their action, leaving UMG and Sony to continue the action.

This class action is brought against Suno in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division relating to the use of copyrighted sound recordings to train its AI music generator. Unlike previous lawsuits brought by major music labels, this complaint focuses on the position of independent artists whose livelihoods depend on licensing.

The Complaint includes 14 counts for relief, including direct copyright infringement, removal of copyright management information, circumvention of access controls, false copyright management information, contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, violation of Illinois Right of Publicity Act, violation of Illinois Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and unjust enrichment. The Plaintiffs describe Suno's practices as "derivative-market cannibalization", where creators use Suno outputs instead of licensing samples, stems or beats from the Plaintiffs, causing significant commercial impact.

The Plaintiffs anticipate Suno will rely on a fair use defence, but argue this would fail given the mass of data copied for commercial use (and indeed success, as Suno has over 25 million users).

Suno has filed a Motion to Dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and improper venue or in the alternative to transfer the venue to the District of Massachusetts (where its principal place of business is and where other lawsuits are also pending).

This class action has been brought by various independent musicians and songwriters in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division, mirroring the complaint against Suno. The Plaintiffs allege that Udio's AI music generation tool scrapes data and copies massive music files without permission to produce musical outputs from simple prompts. The Plaintiffs state that, as independent musicians and songwriters, they depend on licensing their works for their livelihoods. The Complaint alleges that Udio's practices deprive them of licensing opportunities and income. The Complaint includes 14 counts for relief, including direct copyright infringement, removal of copyright management information, circumvention of access controls, false copyright management information, contributory copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, violation of Illinois Right of Publicity Act, violation of Illinois Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and unjust enrichment

This class action in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts is brought against Suno relating to the use of copyrighted sound recordings to train its AI music generator. As the complaint notes, a complaint has been filed against Suno by the world's largest record labels whereas this one focuses on the position of independent artists (the Plaintiff Anthony Justice is an independent country music artist, whose works are held by 5th Wheel Records).

The complaint is for copyright infringement in relation to the training of Suno's model and in the development and production of the service it offers to customers.

The Plaintiffs' Amended Complaint brings in claims relating to DMCA violations (on alleged grounds that Suno engaged in "stream ripping" to bypass encryption access controls on platforms such as YouTube and Spotify) and for violation of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. 

Suno has filed a Motion for an Order dismissing the Plaintiffs' following causes of action: the Second (alleging violation of Plaintiffs' right to prepare derivative works based on their sound recordings), Third (alleging violations of the DMCA relating to "stream ripping" of YouTube videos) and Fourth (under the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act)

This class action complaint has been brought in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York by an independent artist in relation to the Udio.com music generator. The Complaint is for copyright infringement, as well as for violation of the DMCA and of the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. 

The Plaintiff has filed a First Amended Complaint, which adds a DMCA claim for anti-circumvention violations relating to “stream ripping” tracks from YouTube videos.

Udio has filed a Motion to Dismiss in respect of three of the four claims (counts II to IV) namely, copyright infringement based upon purportedly infringing outputs, the DMCA claim and the claim relating to the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. The cause of action relating to copyright infringement based on alleged use of the Plaintiffs' songs in training the model is not part of the motion to dismiss.

This complaint brought in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division by various independent musicians and songwriters, relates to the defendants' music-generation engine Mureka. The complaint is for direct copyright infringement in relation to training, direct copyright infringement in relation to distribution of copyrighted recordings, direct copyright infringement of unregistered recordings, direct copyright infringement of musical-composition lyrics, direct copyright infringement of musical-composition expression, removal or alteration of copyright management information, circumvention of access controls, false copyright management information, contributory copyright infringement in relation to sound recordings and lyrics, vicarious copyright infringement in relation to song recordings and lyrics, violation of Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, violation of Illinois Right Of Publicity Act, violation of Illinois Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and unjust enrichment. This is the third complaint brought by David Woulard and others (in addition to complaints against Udio and Suno). 

This class action complaint has been brought by an author against Apple in the US District Court for the Northern District of California San Jose Division, relating to Apple's Apple Intelligence tools. It alleges Apple used datasets to train the models powering Apple Intelligence that contained pirated and bootlegged copies of copyrighted books. The individual defendants are executives at Apple. The Complaint is for direct copyright infringement. It is the third complaint issued against Apple.

The case has been consolidated with Hendrix v Apple, and Martinez-Conde v Apple.

This class action complaint has been brought by two professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University against Apple in the US District Court Northern District of California. The Plaintiffs argue that Apple infringed their copyright by reproducing their registered works when amassing databases of training materials and using that data to train its "Apple Intelligence" AI models (including Apple Foundation Models and Apple's OpenELM models). The Complaint argues that Apple reproduced and used data sets that included Books3, a data set of pirated, copyrighted books, and also used 'Applebot' a web-crawling software program that they alleged copied mass quantities of internet data. The Complaint also focuses on the use of unauthorised copies of eBooks sold to users through Apple Books. The Complaint is for direct copyright infringement.

The case has been consolidated with Hendrix v Apple, and Alexander v Apple.

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court Southern District of New York by two voice actors and by a John Doe Plaintiff (in relation to all plaintiffs, individually, and on behalf of a class of voice actors). The complaint is against AI firm LOVO in relation to the alleged cloning and use of the actors' voices without their permission in LOVO's AI-generated voice technology (Genny). The complaint was filed in May 2024 and has now been amended to incorporate copyright claims, in addition to claims relating to violations of rights of publicity, deceptive business practices, fraud, and breach of contract. The copyright claims are for copyright infringement of the original voice recordings made by the actors and contributory copyright infringement.

On 10 July, the Court issued an Order in which it granted in part and denied in part Lovo's Motion to Dismiss.  Specifically, the motion was denied as to Sage's copyright claims based on the use of her original voice recording, and as to Plaintiffs' contract claims, New York Civil Rights Law claims, and New York General Business Law claims.  The motion was granted with leave to amend as to Plaintiffs' copyright claims based on the use of their recordings to train the Genny AI model. The motion to dismiss was otherwise granted. The Plaintiffs have filed a Second Amended Class Action Complaint.

Unauthorised use of performers' likenesses and their voices has been a particularly controversial aspect of genAI technology, and has been a key issue for members of the SAG-AFTRA union in the US. There have also been a number of high profile complaints raised by celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson.

Lovo has filed a Motion to Dismiss the copyright infringing training claim from the Second Amended Class Action Complaint.

This class action complaint has been brought by two authors, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, against Apple Inc., in the US District Court for the Northern District Court of California San Francisco Division. As the first GenAI copyright claim against Apple, the complaint focuses on Apple Intelligence, a set of generative AI programs and technologies developed by Apple which, the Plaintiffs allege, has been trained using resources from Books3, a dataset of pirated copyrighted books which includes the Plaintiffs' published works. The claim is for direct copyright infringement.

The case has been consolidated with Martinez-Conde v Apple, and Alexander v Apple.

This class action complaint has been issued in the US District Court Northern District of California by two authors (Rebecca Makkai and Jason Reynolds) against MosaicML and its parent company Databricks. Makkai owns registered copyrights in a number of books including The Hundred Year House, while Reynolds owns registered copyrights in books including As Brave as You.

The plaintiffs allege that their copyright works were included in the training dataset for MosaicML Pretrained Transformer (MPT) a series of large language models created by MosaicML and distributed by Databricks (including MPT-7B launched in May 2023, and MPT-30B launched in June 2023).  MosaicML has noted that a large quantity of data in the MPT training datasets comes from a component dataset called "RedPajama – Books". The complaint asserts that this is hosted on the Hugging Face website and its Books component is a copy of the Books3 dataset, which is itself a component of The Pile, which is derived from the Bibliothik shadow library comprising approximately 196,640 books.  The complaint against MosaicML is for direct copyright infringement.  The complaint against Databricks is for vicarious infringement (Databricks having acquired MosaicML in July 2023).

The case as been consolidated with O'Nan v Databricks (which should be tracked for updates) and re-titled In Re Mosaic Litigation.

In this class action filed by three authors against MosaicML (and its parent company Databricks) in the US District Court Northern District of California San Francisco Division, the Plaintiffs have brought a claim of direct copyright infringement relating to the training of MosaicML's Pretrained Transformer (MPT) models including MPT-7B and MPT-30B.  The complaint alleges that the MPTs were trained on a large quantity of data taken from a component dataset called 'RedPajama – Books' which was a dataset hosted on Hugging Face and in respect of which the 'Books' component is a copy of the "Books3 dataset", which is itself a component of The Pile dataset. The complaint also alleges vicarious infringement against Databricks.

The case has been consolidated with the Makkai claim against Databricks and re-titled In Re Mosaic Litigation.

On 19 August 2025, the Court granted Databricks/Mosaic ML's Motion to Dismiss the Plaintiffs' newly added direct copyright infringement claim against Databricks based on its DBRX models (without leave to amend) as the allegations were too generalised to state a claim.

In this class action complaint filed by three authors against Nvidia in the US District Court Northern District of California San Francisco Division, the Plaintiffs have brought a claim of direct copyright infringement against Nvidia relating to its NeMo Megatron LLM series released in September 2022.

The complaint alleges that the Plaintiff's registered copyrights were included in the training dataset used by Nvidia to develop its models. Each of the models is hosted on a website called Hugging Face, with a model card that provides information about the model, including its training dataset, in which it is stated that the model was trained on 'The Pile' dataset prepared by EleutherAI (the complaint therefore alleges that the LLM series was trained on one or more of the Plaintiffs' works).

The case has been consolidated with Dubus v Nvidia.

Plaintiffs seek an order granting a Motion for Leave to File a First Amended Consolidated Complaint, including to assert new claims for vicarious and contributory infringement

This class action complaint has been issued in the US District Court Northern District of California by two authors owning registered copyrights in certain books that were alleged to be included in the training dataset Nvidia used to train its NeMo Megatron models, released in September 2022.  The complaint alleges that each of the NeMo Megatron models is hosted on a website called Hugging Face and each has a model card that provides information about the model, including its training dataset – for each of the NeMo Megatron models, the model card states that "the model was trained on 'The Pile' dataset prepared by Eleuther AI" (which includes the Book3 dataset, derived from the Bibliothik shadow library). The complaint is for direct copyright infringement.

The case has been consolidated with Nazemian v Nvidia.

This class action complaint has been brought by a number of authors in the US District Court Southern District of New York against Microsoft relating to its Megatron LLM.  The complaint is for copyright infringement in relation to the reproduction of the Plaintiffs' works by downloading from pirated sources and by training on reproduced copies of works.

Plaintiffs E. Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore, both authors, have brought a class action complaint against Salesforce, Inc., in the US District Court, Northern District of California, alleging direct copyright infringement.  The Plaintiffs claim that Salesforce unlawfully copied "hundreds of thousands" of copyrighted books without the authors' consent to train its large language models (LLMs), which power the company's Agentforce AI platform. The Complaint specifically identifies two datasets - RedPajama and ThePile - as sources of the allegedly pirated works.

The case has been related to Alexander v. Salesforce, Inc.

This complaint has been brought in the US District Court of Montana Butte Division by Darius James, an author, who complains about the use of his works in the training set (including the RedPajama dataset) used by Snowflake to train its Arctic LLMs. The complaint is for direct copyright infringement.

This class action complaint was brought in the US District Court Northern District of California against OpenAI. The original Plaintiff is a YouTube user and video creator and the complaint relates to the "surreptitious, non-consensual transcription of millions of YouTube users' videos" to train the Defendants' AI software products. The complaint refers to a New York Times report that claimed Whisper (OpenAI's automatic speech recognition system, released in 2022) is capable of transcribing audio from YouTube videos, and that an OpenAI team had transcribed more than one million hours of videos from YouTube. The claim is for unjust enrichment and unfair competition.

The complaint was amended to bring in a new plaintiff (Ruslana Petryazhna) and to add complaints of breaches of the Massachusetts Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices Act, and for direct copyright infringement.

It is notable that the complaint, as initially filed, did not include one of copyright infringement. It is assumed (as asserted by OpenAI) that this is because there will have been no registrations of some of the works in issue in this case.

In February 2025, the Plaintiffs filed a Statement of Non-Opposition to OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss in relation to the state law claims for unjust enrichment and unfair competition. The statement of non-opposition did not impact the claim for direct copyright infringement. The complaint is now proceeding only in the name of Ruslana Petryazhna as class plaintiff and a Second Amended Complaint has been filed.

The case has been transferred to the Southern District of New York.

This class action complaint was brought in the US District Court Northern District of California against Google/YouTube concerning Google's Gemini products. The original Plaintiff is a YouTube user and video creator. The complaint relates to the "surreptitious, non-consensual transcription of millions of YouTube users' videos" to train the Defendants' AI software products. The complaint refers to a New York Times article that reported that Google had transcribed YouTube videos to harvest text for its language models, having changed its terms of service in 2023. The claim as originally drafted was for unjust enrichment and unfair competition.

The complaint was amended to bring in claims under Massachusetts Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices Act, and for direct copyright infringement (by a new Plaintiff, Ruslana Petryazhna, and on behalf of a copyright class).

In February 2025, the Plaintiffs filed a Statement of Non-Opposition to OpenAI's Motion to Dismiss in relation to the state law claims for unjust enrichment and unfair competition. 

On 30 April 2025, the Plaintiff filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal of the complaint, without prejudice.

This class action complaint has been brought in the US District Court Northern District of California against Nvidia (there are separate claims against Google/YouTube and OpenAI – the three cases have been related) concerning the training of Nvidia's Cosmos AI software.  The Plaintiff is a YouTube user and video creator and the complaint relates to the "surreptitious, non-consensual transcription of millions of YouTube users' videos" to train the Defendants' AI software products in violation of YouTube's terms of service and at the expense of video creators.

Nvidia has filed a Motion to Dismiss on the grounds that the Plaintiffs lack standing (for not asserting that the Plaintiff has suffered or will suffer a concrete, particularised injury) and that the claims are pre-empted by the Copyright Act. 

The complaint has been amended to bring in claims under Massachusetts Unfair and Deceptive Business Practices Act, and for direct copyright infringement (by a new Plaintiff, and on behalf of a copyright class). Nvidia has filed a Motion to Dismiss the Amended Claim.

On 24 March 2025, the Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their claims against Nvidia, without prejudice.

This complaint has been brought by author Elizabeth Lyon (and a proposed class) against Adobe in the US District Court Northern District of California San Jose Division, relating to Adobe's SlimLM models and the SlimPajama dataset (said to be derived from the RedPajama dataset).  The complaint is for direct copyright infringement. This is the first GenAI complaint brought against Adobe.

This case concerns whether copyright can be registered in a creative work made by artificial intelligence – specifically a piece called 'A Recent Entrance to Paradise' which was created autonomously by an AI tool (the AI tool, Creativity Machine, was created by Dr Thaler who listed the system as the work's creator and himself as the 'Copyright Claimant' as 'a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine').

The work was denied registration by the US Copyright Office on the basis there was no human author to support a claim to copyright registration. The proceedings in the US District Court for the District of Columbia sought to overturn the USCO refusal to register. The case was therefore a judicial review hearing of the Copyright Office's decision as a final agency decision.

Following cross motions for summary judgment, on 18 August 2023, Judge Beryl A. Howell issued an Order (and accompanying Memorandum Opinion) dismissing the Plaintiff's motion for summary judgment and granting the Defendants' cross-motion for summary judgment.

The Judge concluded that the Registrar had not acted arbitrarily or capriciously in reaching its conclusion that the copyright registration should be denied.    Thaler's argument is that AI generated works deserve copyright protection as a matter of policy. The Judge said that "copyright has never stretched so far, however, as to protect works generated by new forms of technology absent any guiding human hand … human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright".

Dr Thaler filed a Notice of Appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Oral argument was heard by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on 19 September 2024.

On 18 March 2025, the Court's Opinion (of Circuit Judge Millett) was delivered, affirming the denial of copyright, because the Copyright Act 1976 requires all eligible work to be authored in the first instance by a human author, and Dr Thaler's application had listed the Creativity Machine as the work's sole author. The Court's decision underlines that humanity is a necessary condition for authorship under the Copyright Act, whereas machines are tools used by humans in the creative process.  Adhering to the human-authorship requirement would not impede protection for works made with AI; any line-drawing disagreements as to how much AI had contributed to a particular human author's work were irrelevant here as Dr Thaler had listed the Creativity Machine as the sole author of the work. The Court did not therefore need to deal with the Copyright Office's argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material.

The appellant's petition for rehearing or, in the alternative, rehearing en banc (on the basis that the decision conflicts with Supreme Court precedent on statutory interpretation) was denied.

Dr Thaler has filed a petition with the US Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari for a review of the judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In the statement of case, he argues that the 1976 Copyright Act does not require a particular sort of traditional human contribution for a work to obtain copyright protection and that instead the Act explicitly allows non-human authorship. However, he argues, the USCO and the US Court of Appeal have "determined that an unwritten, and unclear, rule of human authorship should be read into the statute".  The petition argues that the USCO has created a "chilling effect on anyone else considering using AI creatively".

The position on whether content created by AI generators is protectable differs from country to country (as noted below re the position in the UK as compared to the US). We have written about this here. 

This case relates to an image created by the artist Jason Allen titled "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" by providing hundreds (around 600) iterative text prompts to the AI system Midjourney, which was rejected by the US Copyright Office for there not being a human that had "executed the traditional elements of authorship". Having filed a Complaint and Request for Declaratory Relief in the US District Court for the District of Colorado, Mr Allen has now filed a Motion for Summary Judgment as to the legal issue of whether a work generated by human creativity using AI as a tool is copyrightable. The Motion argues that the USCO's policy is inconsistent with the text and purpose of the Copyright Act but that, even if it did require that a person execute the traditional elements of human authorship, that standard has been met.

This claim has been brought by Getty Images against AI image generator Stability AI in the UK High Court. Getty Images' claim (as summarised in its press release when commencing the claim) was that, through its Stable Diffusion model (under the name DreamStudio), Stability AI had "unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata owned or represented by Getty Images absent a license to benefit Stability AI's commercial interests and to the detriment of content creators". The claims related to copyright infringement, database right infringement, and trade mark infringement and passing off.

Following the trial in June 2025, the Court handed down its decision in November 2025. The High Court rejected Getty Images' secondary copyright infringement claim, finding that Stable Diffusion's model weights - though trained on datasets that included Getty's images - did not constitute 'infringing copies' as they do not store the original copyright works. However, the court did find limited and historic trade mark infringement relating to watermarks appearing in outputs from certain versions of Stable Diffusion. Getty had abandoned two significant claims during the trial: copyright infringement during the training and development process (which had taken place outside of the UK) and copyright infringement in outputs. This means certain important issues relating to GenAI and copyright remain yet to be considered by UK courts. 

We discuss the Court's judgment in more detail in our article: Getty Images v Stability AI: Unpacking the High Court's judgment. The judge has granted Getty Images permission to appeal on the secondary copyright infringement point but has refused permission to appeal to Stability AI on her findings on the trademark infringement claim. Stability will need to therefore seek permission from the Court of Appeal on that point. On the copyright issue, the court noted that the point was both novel and important, with potentially far-reaching ramifications, for AI models, but also other intangible articles such as software more generally.

The German collecting society, GEMA (which represents the interests of around 95,000 members in Germany), issued proceedings against OpenAI in relation to the reproduction of protected song lyrics by German authors. The proceedings were issued in the Munich Regional Court and argue that, when simple prompts are entered into ChatGPT, it reproduces the original song lyrics with which "the system has obviously been trained". GEMA had previously declared an opt-out from text and data mining on behalf of its members in accordance with the provisions in the Digital Single Market Copyright Directive.

This was the first lawsuit filed by a collecting society worldwide against a provider of a genAI system and has therefore been watched very closely. GEMA presented a generative AI licensing model in September 2024 calling for a responsible approach to genAI, including protection of IP, fair participation of creative professionals in value creation, sustainability, and transparency and responsibility from AI providers.

On 11 November 2025, the Court handed down it's decision in favour of GEMA based on its argument of reproduction of song texts in OpenAI's LLMs and also their reproduction in outputs. The Court concluded that memorization meant that the lyrics were reproducibly contained in two OpenAI LLMs (finding that indirect perceptibility is sufficient for reproduction) and that the reproduction of the song lyrics in outputs also encroached on the rights holders' rights. The Court rejected OpenAI's reliance on the text and data mining exception as the training not only extracted information from training data, but also reproduced the works, which did not amount to text and data mining. The Court rejected making a reference to the CJEU but it is likely that OpenAI will appeal. Gema's CEO has said: “The internet is not some kind of self-service buffet, and creative achievements by human beings are not simply templates for use free of charge. Today, we have set a precedent that both protects and clarifies the rights of creative copyright holders: operators of AI tools such as ChatGPT must also comply with copyright law. Today, we successfully defended the livelihoods of music creators.”

Following its claim against OpenAI in relation to reproduction of protected song lyrics, Gema has filed a complaint against Suno Inc in the Munich Regional Court in relation to its core area, licensing of playable music titles. In its complaint, GEMA argues that using simple prompts, the system outputs "obviously infringe copyright, in terms of melody, harmony and rhythm", providing examples such as Mambo No. 5 by Lou Bega and Daddy Cool by Boney M. It has provided sound files in its press release which it argues demonstrates the similarities between the original songs and those produced using Suno.

In its FAQ, GEMA notes that the aim of the lawsuits is to obtain a licence fee for the authors and music publishers who works have been trained (and has drawn up a licence model for these purposes). However, it is not seeking to prevent the use of GEMA works by AI systems in general. Neighbouring rights of performers and producers of sound recordings are also not the subject of the lawsuit.

The District Court of Hamburg in Germany was asked to consider infringement arising out of the use of images taken by photographer Robert Kneschke (which had been downloaded from Shutterstock which had terms and conditions prohibiting scraping etc) against LAION, during the creation of its LAION 5B dataset of image-text pairs made available free of charge (LAION is a not for profit organisation). The claim specifically does not cover further acts of training or development of AI models using the data set (by companies such as Stability AI, for example).

The District Court delivered its decision on 27 September 2024. It found that there was an infringement of the Plaintiff's copyright work by reproduction in the creation of the dataset. The Defendant was not entitled to rely upon the defence of temporary reproduction as the act of reproduction was not transient or incidental. However, as a research organisation, the Defendant could rely upon the exception for text and data mining for non-commercial scientific research purposes (as provided for in Article 3 of the Digital Single Market (DSM) Copyright Directive, and implemented in German law) in relation to its acts of scraping and analysis in the creation of the data set. The data set had been published free of charge and made available to researchers in the field of artificial neural networks. It was irrelevant in the assessment of the creation of the data set that it was also used by commercial companies for training and further developing their AI systems.

The Court therefore did not need to decide whether the Defendant could also rely on the general text and data mining exception provided for in Article 4 of the DSM Copyright Directive. Unlike the exception in Art.3, a right holder can opt out of the TDM exception in Art.4 provided that its reservation of rights is in a machine-readable format. Whilst the Court did not need to decide on this issue, it suggested that a reservation of rights written solely in 'natural language' would be 'machine understandable' but this would need to be assessed depending on the technical development at the relevant time of use of the work.

The Higher Regional Court of Hamburg has upheld the lower court's decision but also went further, finding that LAION could also rely upon the TDM exception in Article 4 of the Digital Single Market Copyright Directive, because the Plaintiff was unable to rely upon a reservation of rights expressed in natural language as this did not meet the requirement of machine-readability as at the relevant date in 2021. It is likely this case will be further appealed to the Federal Court of Justice, with potential scope also for questions to be referred to the CJEU.

Three associations acting on behalf of authors and publishers have brought proceedings against Meta in the 3rd Chamber of the Paris Judicial Court arising out of alleged use of copyrighted works, without authorisation of their authors and publishers, in order to train its GenAI model. This is the first action brought in France by rights holders in relation to the training of GenAI models. The plaintiffs demand copyright enforcement and the complete removal of the data repositories used to train the GenAI model.

This claim, brought by a range of leading Canadian media companies and news publishers, has been issued against OpenAI in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. The claim is for a declaration that the various OpenAI defendants are jointly and severally liable for (i) infringing, authorizing and/or inducing infringement of copyright in various works published on the media companies' websites (ii) engaging in prohibited circumvention of technological protection measures; (iii) breaching the terms of use of the plaintiffs' various websites; and (iv) unjust enrichment at the expense of the plaintiffs.

This is the first case brought against OpenAI in Canada and represents a fresh jurisdiction where it is now facing allegations of copyright infringement and related claims. Proceedings have also been brought in Canada at the British Columbia Supreme Court by the Canadian Legal Information Institute against Caseway AI.

On 12 July 2024, the EU AI Act was published in the Official Journal of the EU.  The Act entered into force on 1 August 2024 and will be fully applicable 24 months after its entry into force, i.e., on 2 August 2026 (though certain provisions will be applicable sooner, and others at 36 months). There are staggered dates for when different parts of the Act will take effect (see our EU AI Act implementation tracker for more information) :

• 6 months after coming into force, provisions concerning banned AI practices take effect (2 February 2025)
• 1 year after coming into force, provisions on penalties, confidentiality obligations and general-purpose AI take effect (2 August 2025)
• 2 years after coming into force, the remaining provisions take effect (2 August 2026)
• 3 years after coming into force, obligations for high-risk AI systems forming a product (or safety component of a product) regulated by EU product safety legislation apply (2 August 2027)

In relation to copyright, the Act contains provisions relating to obligations on general-purpose AI systems around compliance with EU copyright law (including relating to text and data mining and opt-outs under the EU Digital Single Market Copyright Directive) and transparency around content used to train such models in the form of sufficiently detailed summaries. This form is now available and is mandatory for completion for GPAI models put on the market from 2 August 2025 (with grandfathering provisions in place).  We have written about the template, the information to be provided, and how useful this will be for rights holders here. 

The GPAI Code of Practice requires signatories to: 

• Draw up, keep up-to-date and implement a copyright policy
• Reproduce and extract only lawfully accessible copyright-protected content when crawling the World Wide Web
• Identify and comply with rights reservations when crawling the World Wide Web
• Mitigate the risk of copyright-infringing outputs
• Designate a point of contact and enabling the lodging of complaints

Signatories are also required to provide a general description of how the model was trained, including a breakdown of each training stage and key technical/design choices and assumptions, as well as how its training data was sourced.

The Code is voluntary and non-binding, and is intended to assist GPAI providers in compliance with the relevant provisions of the AI Act. It does not supersede or otherwise affect existing requirements to comply with other applicable laws, directives and regulatory frameworks, such as copyright. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others have signed the Code, whereas Meta is the outlier stating that Europe is going down "the wrong path" on AI regulation.

The Commission has published a consultation on protocols for reserving rights from TDM under the EU AI Act and the GPAI Code of Practice which seeks to gather evidence on the use of existing rights reservations solutions, and to contribute to discussions to help identify and agree upon opt-out solutions.

The Commission has published the first draft of a Code of Practice on Transparency relating to the obligations under Article 50. Following further discussions, the second draft is scheduled for publication in March 2026. The draft covers:

• Rules for making and detecting AI-generated and manipulated content applicable to providers of AI systems including the following commitments:
  • Multi-layered marking of AI-generated content including machine-readable marking techniques, marking techniques for specific modalities, structural marking for open-weight AI models and systems, marking techniques at the level of the generative AI model, non-removal of machine-readable marking, transparency of the provenance chain, functionality for perceptible markings (for deepfakes and other content)
  • Detection of the marking of AI-generated content including enabling detection by users and other third parties, detectors for already marked AI-generated content produced by a generative AI model, forensic detection mechanisms, human-understandable and accessible disclosure of verification and detection results, support literacy for AI content provenance and verification
  • Measures to meet requirements for marking and detection techniques
  • Testing, verification and compliance
• Rules for labelling of deepfakes and AI-generated and manipulated text applicable to deployers of AI systems including the following commitments:
  • Disclosure of origin of AI-generated and manipulated content based on a common taxonomy and an icon
  • Compliance, training and monitoring
  • Ensuring accessible disclosure for all natural persons
  • Specific measures for deepfake disclosure including internal processes for consistent classification, clear and distinguishable disclosure, and appropriate disclosure for creative works
  • Specific measures for disclosure of AI-generated or manipulated text including internal processes, clear and distinguishable disclosure, and human review, editorial control and responsibility

The UK Government issued its much-anticipated consultation on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in December 2024.

The consultation seeks to reach a balance between competing interests, and to thereby unlock opportunities for AI training in the UK, whilst also ensuring protection for creative works (described by one Minister as a "win win"). Subject to the responses it receives to its consultation, the Government proposes to introduce a text and data mining exception allowing copyright works to be used in training, but making it subject to rights reservation by right holders (i.e., an opt-out). This is intended to allow them to exercise control over their works by opting them out, or otherwise licensing them for AI training and obtaining payment for their use. Underpinning this would be a requirement of greater transparency from AI developers as to the material used to train their models, how they have acquired those materials and in relation to the content generated by their models. There would also need to be standardisation of opt-out mechanisms.

The consultation also considers a range of other issues such as protection for computer-generated works as well as infringing outputs, the temporary copies exception, the existing text and data mining exception for non-commercial research, labelling of AI outputs, use of AI in education, digital replicas, and other emerging issues. In relation to protection for computer-generated works, the Government's preferred position is for this protection to be removed, unless it is satisfied that there is evidence of the incentives this protection provides.

Read more

There have been a significant number of responses (over 11,000) to the consultation. 

This issue has also been debated in attempts to introduce amendments in the Data (Use and Access) Bill relating to copyright and transparency which led to extensive 'ping-pong' between the two Houses of Parliament. The House of Lords finally accepted a version of the Bill proposed by the Government after securing concessions that it will publish a report on its proposals for copyright and AI within nine months of the Act receiving Royal Assent, and interim reports every six months thereafter. These reports must include information on the Government's approach to enforcement and analysis regarding AI models that have been trained outside of the UK.

On 17 December 2025, the Government published its progress report as required by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. On the key question of whether to introduce a text and data mining exception, an overwhelming majority (88%) of those that responded via the online survey service expressed support for requiring licences in all cases, with only 3%  supporting the Government's preferred option of a text and data mining exception with rights holder opt-out. The final report must be published by 18 March 2026, and be accompanied by an Economic Impact Assessment. Our article discusses the content of the progress report.

In March 2023, the US Copyright Office published a Statement of Policy setting out its approach to registration of works containing material generated by AI.

The guidance states that only the human created parts of a generative AI work are protected by copyright. Accordingly, only where a human author arranges AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship’ or modifies AI-generated content ‘to such a degree that the modifications meet the standard for copyright protection,’ will the human-authored aspects of such works be potentially protected by copyright. 

This statement follows a decision by the USCO on copyright registration for Zarya of the Dawn ('the Work'), an 18-page graphic novel featuring text alongside images created using the AI platform Midjourney. Originally, the USCO issued a copyright registration for the graphic novel before undertaking investigations which showed that the artist had used Midjourney to create the images. Following this investigation (which included viewing the artist’s social media), the USCO cancelled the original certificate and issued a new one covering only the text as well as the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements. In reaching this conclusion, the USCO deemed that the artist’s editing of some of the images was not sufficiently creative to be entitled to copyright as a derivative work.

As part of its study of the copyright law and policy issues raised by AI systems, in August 2023, the USCO sought written comments from stakeholders on a number of questions:

1. The use of copyrighted works to train AI models 
2. The copyrightability of material generated using AI systems
3. Potential liability for infringing works generated using AI systems
4. Issues related to copyright 

In July 2024, the USCO published Part 1 of its Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, focusing on Digital Replicas (also called 'deepfakes'). Based on the input received, the USCO concluded that a new federal law is needed to deal with unauthorised digital replicas, as existing laws do not provide sufficient legal redress. This would cover all individuals, not just celebrities. However, whilst the paper also notes that creators have concerns over AI outputs that deliberately imitate an artist's style, it does not recommend including style in the coverage of the new legislation at this time.    

In January 2025, the USCO published Part 2 of its report, focused on copyrightability of outputs from using generative AI. The report concludes that outputs can only be protected by copyright where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output. However, it will not apply in the case of mere provision of prompts. The report also confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creating/including AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work may be protected by copyright.

In May 2025, the USCO published a 'pre-publication' version of Part 3 of its Report, focusing on generative AI training. The report considers the steps involved in creating and deploying a generative AI system which involve using copyrighted works in ways that implicate the right of reproduction including: data collection and creation; training; RAG; and production of outputs.  In relation to fair use, the Office notes that the responses it had received to its Notice of Inquiry were 'sharply divided'.  Given that generative AI involves a spectrum of uses and impacts, the Office notes that it is not possible to prejudge litigation outcomes but does offer the following analysis:

• On the first factor, the Office expresses the view that training a generative AI foundation model on a large and diverse dataset will often be transformative but this will depend on the functionality of the model and how it is deployed. Meanwhile, the use of RAG is less likely to be transformative  where the purpose is to generate outputs that summarise/provide abridged versions of copyrighted works, as opposed to hyperlinks. The USCO forms the view that the knowing use of a dataset consisting of pirated or illegally accessed works should weigh against fair use without being determinative.
• On the fourth factor, the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (the most important factor), the Office identifies that where a model can produce substantially similar outputs that directly substitute for works in the training data, it can lead to lost sales. Even where outputs are not substantially similar, they can dilute the market for similar works in the training data, including by generating material stylistically similar to those works. The assessment of market harm will also depend on the extent to which copyright works can be licensed for AI training. 

Introduced by Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, The Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act would require a notice to be submitted to the Register of Copyrights prior to a new generative AI system being released, providing information on all copyrighted works used in building or altering the training dataset. It would also apply retroactively to existing genAI systems.

The Bill has attracted widespread support from across the creative community including from industry associations and Unions such as the Recording Industry Association of America, Copyright Clearance Center, Directors Guild of America, Authors Guild, National Association of Voice Actors, Concept Art Association, Professional Photographers of America, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Writers Guild of America West, Writers Guild of America East, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, American Society for Collective Rights Licensing, International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Society of Composers and Lyricists, National Music Publishers Association, Recording Academy, Nashville Songwriters Association International, Songwriters of North America, Black Music Action Coalition, Music Artist Coalition, Human Artistry Campaign, and the American Association of Independent Music.