1/2/26: The Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has decided Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg. The panels's per curiam opinion affirms the district court's decision on all grounds. (There is a separate unpublished opinion upholding the jury's fair use determination.) Both Judge Wardlaw and Judge Johnstone filed concurring opinions, agreeing that extant 9th Circuit law requires affirmance but arguing that the 9th Circuit should revisit its precedent and get rid of the intrinsic test.

11/28/25: President Trump petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay of the DC Circuit's order to reinstate Shira Perlmutter as Register of Copyrights while she pursues her lawsuit challenging her purported firing. On Wednesday, the Court deferred that petition pending its resolution of the cases challenging Trump's authority to fire Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission and Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board. Read Amy Howe's write-up for ScotusBlog.

Elizabeth C. recommends this article in Music Business Worldwide about British recording artists' "silent album," recorded to protest the UK government's proposed copyright amendments, which are intended to ease unlicensed training of AI models.

11/15/25: Axios Nashville's Nate Rau reports that both the number one song and the number three song on Billboard's Country Music Digital Sales chart for the week of November 15 are AI-generated. Breaking Rust's "Walk My Walk"(at #1) and Cain Walker's "Don't Tread on Me" (at #3) have been outselling music created by their human brethren. Digital Music News's Dylan Smith is skeptical.

11/6/25: Xania Monet is an AI artist whose songs and recordings have been created by poet Telisha Jones. (Jones writes the lyrics and uses an AI music generator app to add everything else.) The recordings have enjoyed great success on conventional radio. According to Wikipedia, Billboard's "Adult R&B" list is a chart of the songs that receive the most airplay on urban adult contemporary radio stations. Xania Monet's track "How Was I Supposed to Know?" debuted as number 30 on that chart last week, the first known appearance of an AI artist on a Billboard chart. Read Trevor Anderson's story for Billboard.

11/3/25: UMG sued Udio last year alleging that Udio had trained its AI model using UMG sound recordings that it had scraped from the Internet. Last week, UMG and Udio announced that they had settled the lawsuit, and agreed to launch a new subscription AI service that would allow subscribers to create new songs using music licensed by UMG. Allegedly, UMG artists will have an option to opt in and will receive some payment. Read Katherine Sayre's article for the Wall Street Journal [gift link], and Paul Resnikoff's story for Digital Music News.

10/30/25: SDNY Judge Sidney Stein has denied a motion to dismiss consolidated copyright class action suits based on the allegation that Open AI generates output that infringes the copyrights in books authored by members of the class. Read the opinion.

9/26/25: The estate of Michael Crichton has filed a lawsuit alleging that The Pitt is an unauthorized reboot of ER, a 1990s medical drama derived from Crichton's screenplay. Lily recommends this NY Times article by Nicholas Kulish [gift link].

9/16/25: In 2015, the Internet Archive launched the Great 78 project, an effort to digitize and preserve old shellac and vinyl sound recordings made between 1898 and 1960. At the time, sound recordings fixed before 1972 were unprotected by federal copyright (although many of the musical works embodied in those recordings were copyrighted). In 2018, Congress enacted the Music Modernization Act, which extended statutory protection to pre-1972 sound recordings. (We will get to the Music Modernization Act in Chapter 7). In 2023, record labels filed suit against the Internet Archive, seeking $621 million in statutory damages for willful infringement of these new rights. Yesterday, the parties filed a notice that they had reached a confidential settlement. Read Ashley Belanger's story for Ars Technica or Jon Blistein's story for Rolling Stone.

9/15/25: Former Congressman George Santos opened an account on Cameo, inviting members of the public to pay him to create personalized videos. Late night host Jimmy Kimmel requested videos on the platform using assumed names, and then broadcast the videos on his show as part of a series of segments titled "Will Santos Say It?" Santos sued Kimmel for copyright infringement for broadcasting his videos. The district court dismissed the complaint, ruling that Kimmel's use of the videos was fair use under § 107. This morning, the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed. Read the opinion.

9/10/25: The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has granted Shira Perlmutter's emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal restoring her to office as Register of Copyrights. The majority concludes that "Perlmutter's purported removal was likely unlawful." Read the order.

9/9/25: Elizabeth C. recommends this Law 360 post by Theresa Schliep presenting an overview of the copyright infringement cases filed against generative AI companies.

9/5/25: The details of the settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic have been released. Anthropic has agreed to pay ~ $3000 per work to the copyright owners of the roughly 500,000 rights holders in the class certified by Judge Alsup. That will add up to $1.5 billion. Read Cade Metz's story for the New York Times [giftlink]:

"As part of the settlement, Anthropic said it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released. The settlement also gives any others the right to still sue Anthropic if they believe that the company’s technologies are reproducing their works without proper approval. Anthropic also agreed to delete the pirated works it downloaded and stored."

Because the case is a class action, Judge Alsup will need to approve the settlement before it can take effect. Read the motion for approval of the settlement filed with the court. Dave Hansen of the Authors Alliance has posted an analysis.

- - - - 9/9/25 Update: Judge Alsup withheld approval of the settlement for now, pending the parties' resolving and disclosing additional details. Read Ed Lee's post to Chat GPT is Eating the World.

- - - - 9/26/25 Update:Judge Alsup has now granted the settlement preliminary approval. Read Annelise Levy's storyfor Bloomberg news.

9/5/25: Yesterday Warner Bros Discovery sued Midjourney for infringement of its cartoon and comic book characters. Read Emma Roth's story for The Verge or/and Warner Bros Discovery's complaint.

8/31/25: Choreographer Felix Burgos has sued Epic Games, claiming that the Fortnite emote "Touching the Sky" infringes his choreography for Rauw Alejandro's official video for his 2024 recording Touching the Sky. After the Hanagami case, Epic adopted the practice of paying license fees to some choreographers for using their dance moves as the basis for emotes, but the company did not seek permission or a license from Burgos. Read Derrick Bryson Taylor's story [gift link] for the New York Times.

8/29/25: The terms of the Bartz v Anthropic settlement won't be made public until September 8. The class certified by Judge Alsup was limited to the owners of copyrights in books that had been registered before Anthropic downloaded the books. (As we will learn, prompt registration is required to collect statutory damages.) Typical book publishing contracts call for the publisher to register the book's copyright promptly. Multiple authors who have published books with major publishers are currently complaining on social media that they looked up their registrations in the Copyright Office records and discovered that their publishers apparently failed to register at least some of their copyrights.

8/26/25: The parties in Bartz v Anthropic report that they have reached a class-wide settlement of all claims in the case. Read Dylan Smith's story for Digital Music News.

6/30/25: The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in No. 24-171, Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case presents the question when is it appropriate to impose liability for contributory infringement on an internet service provider whose subscribers have committed copyright infringement. Read the cert. petition.

6/29/25: District Judge Vince Chhabria granted partial summary judgement to Meta in the second AI training infringement suit, on reasoning that diverges from Judge Alsup's reasoning in Bartz v. Anthropic. Judge Chhabria writes:

In this case, thirteen authors—mostly famous fiction writers—have sued Meta for downloading their books from online “shadow libraries” and using the books to train Meta’s generative AI models (specifically, its large language models, called Llama). The parties have filed cross-motions for partial summary judgment, with the plaintiffs arguing that Meta’s conduct cannot possibly be fair use, and with Meta responding that its conduct must be considered fair use as a matter of law. In connection with these fair use arguments, the plaintiffs offer two primary theories for how the markets for their works are affected by Meta’s copying. They contend that Llama is capable of reproducing small snippets of text from their books. And they contend that Meta, by using their works for training without permission, has diminished the authors’ ability to license their works for the purpose of training large language models. As explained below, both of these arguments are clear losers. Llama is not capable of generating enough text from the plaintiffs’ books to matter, and the plaintiffs are not entitled to the market for licensing their works as AI training data. As for the potentially winning argument—that Meta has copied their works to create a product that will likely flood the market with similar works, causing market dilution—the plaintiffs barely give this issue lip service, and they present no evidence about how the current or expected outputs from Meta’s models would dilute the market for their own works.

Given the state of the record, the Court has no choice but to grant summary judgment to Meta on the plaintiffs’ claim that the company violated copyright law by training its models with their books. But in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited. This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these thirteen authors—not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful. It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.

Read the opinion.

6/24/25: District Court Judge William Alsup has decided the first of several pending summary judgement motions in a basketful of cases on the question whether using copyrighted works to train generative AI is infringement or fair use. Bartz v. Anthropic involves the creation of a digital library from scanned purchased books and books downloaded from sites on the internet that hosted unauthorized copies of texts, and the use of parts of that library to train the large language model underlying Anthropic's chatbot Claude. Plaintiffs brought a putative class action for copyright infringement, and Anthropic moved for summary judgment on the ground that its use of plaintiffs' books was fair use under 17 USC § 107. Judge Alsup's opinion holds:

To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies. However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.

You can read the full opinion here.

6/13/25: NPR's Chloe Veltman reports that Disney and Universal have filed a copyright infringement suit against Midjourney, alleging that its outputs infringe the studios' copyrights. Read the Complaint.

5/11/25: Politico's Katherine Tully-McManus reportsLinks to an external site. that President Trump fired Register Shira Perlmutter on Saturday. News stories from CBS NewsLinks to an external site. and the Washington PostLinks to an external site. imply that Friday's draft Report on AI and fair use might have had something to do with it. Perlmutter and Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (who was fired via email on ThursdayLinks to an external site.) had attracted the attention of the American Accountability FoundationLinks to an external site., which had characterized both of them as "deep state librarians" and accused them of donating to Democrats.

5/10/25: The Copyright Office has issued a draft prepublication version of its part 3 of its policy study on artificial intelligence and copyright, discussing on whether and under what circumstances training generative artificial intelligence using copyrighted works should be fair use. Read the draft. Download Read the draft.

4/9/25: The Hollywood Reporter's Ethan Millman reports that Senators Coons, Blackburn, Klobuchar and Tillis have reintroduced the bipartisan NO FAKES ("Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe ") Act, with support from SAG-AFTRA, the RIAA, the MPA, the Recording Academy, YouTube, and Open AI. The Bill would establish a federal right of publicity and require online platforms to block or remove AI deepfakes. Read the text of the Bill.

4/4/25: Reuters' Blake Brittain reports that the panel on multidistrict litigation has consolidated twelve copyright infringement cases filed against OpenAI and assigned them to SDNY district court judge Sidney Stein. Read the order. Judge Stein released an opinion on Friday in the lawsuits brought by the New York Times and the Daily News against Microsoft and Open AI, denying defendants' motions to dismss the copyright claims.

3/28/25: Larball Publishing, the owner of the copyrights to the songs Wiggle and Giggle All Night and Don Diablo sued Dua Lipa, claiming that her hit song Levitating infringed its copyrights in both songs. Yesterday, SDNY Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted defendants' motion for summary judgment and dismissed Larball's infringement complaint. Judge Failla ruled that the only similarities between the songs involved uncopyrightable musical elements. Read Dylan Smith's story for Digital Music News.

3/26/25: Music publishers sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, alleging that Anthropic's use of song lyrics to train its large language model Claude infringed their copyrights. On Tuesday, the district court denied plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction prohibiting Anthropic from further use of song lyrics for training. Read the opinion.

3/26/25: Tempo Music purchased the copyright interest of one of the four coauthors of Bruno Mars's song When I Was Your Man. Tempo sued Miley Cyrus, contending that her hit song, Flowers, infringes its copyright in When I Was Your Man. Cyrus and her codefendants moved to dismiss the complaint, arguing that since Tempo owns only the rights it purchased from one of four coauthors, it lacks standing under § 501(b) because it does not own any "exclusive right under copyright." Last week, the district court judge denied the motion. Read the opinion.

3/20/25: Andy Stone (aka Vince Vance of Vince Vance and the Valiants) sued Mariah Carey, claiming that Carey's perennial Christmas hit, All I Want for Christmas is You, infringes the copyright in his 1989 release, All I Want for Christmas is You. Both parties filed motions for summary judgment, supported by reports from forensic musicologists. The court credited the reports of plaintiff's experts and rejected the reports of defendant's experts, and concluded that plaintiff had failed to show that the songs were substantially similar under the extrinsic test. The judge therefore granted defendant's summary judgement motion. Read Judge Almadani's opinion.

3/18/25: The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has affirmed the district court decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter, upholding the Register's denial of registration for a work that was purportedly created autonomously by a generative AI computer model. The court held that "As a matter of statutory law the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being." Read the opinion.

3/17/25: Complete Music Update's Chris Cooke reports that El Salvadoran composer Alfr3d has sued Reggaeton artist Karol G for copyright infringement, claiming that her hit track Gatúbela infringes the copyright in Punto G, a beat he posted online six weeks earlier. Alfr3d identified the beat as free for noncommercial use, and available to be licensed for commercial use. Karol G did not seek a license. Read the Complaint.

3/12/25: George Clinton (the musician whose recordings were sampled in the Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films case -- see page 428 of the Casebook) has filed a copyright infringement suit against Bridgeport Music (the copyright owner and plaintiff in the Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films case), claiming that it fraudulently acquired the copyrights to his songs and recordings, registered copyrights in Clinton's works in the names of imaginary coauthors, failed to pay Clinton royalties, executed contracts on his behalf without telling him, and ignored Clinton's efforts under § 203 and § 304 to terminate copyright assignment to Bridgeport. Read the Complaint.

3/12/25: Spotify has released its annual "Loud & Clear" Report on the economics of music streaming. It reports that it paid out more than $10,000,000,000 to music rights holders last year. In response to complaints that Spotify pays songwriters and recording artists too little, it has this rejoinder:

There are more artists making more money on Spotify than ever before. In fact, the number of artists generating royalties at every threshold on this site — from $1,000 to $10 million per year* — has at least tripled since 2017. Ten years ago, the top artist on Spotify generated just over $5 million. Today, there are over 200 artists who have passed that threshold.

Know what’s grown even faster? The number of uploaders to Spotify, which is now nearly 12 million. Looking back to the peak of the CD era, only a few thousand artists had their music on the shelves of record stores.

The paradox? Streaming has allowed millions to easily share their music globally — that’s an amazing thing. But the sheer volume of uploaders means the fraction who find success appears smaller over time. The fact remains: Thanks to streaming, more artists than ever before are generating royalties at every career stage. More than at any time in music history. And we think that’s what really matters.

3/7/25: Columbia Law School's Kernochan Center has posted a visual arts infringement database containing images drawn from decided and settled cases involving visual arts.

2/24/25: The Association for Research Libraries has declared that this week is Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week. Check out the infographic of fair use fundamentals. See a listing of fair use/fair dealing week events here. For a different perspective, visit the Copyright Alliance's Fair Use Week page.

2/23/25: Rolling Stone's Cheyenne Roundtree reports that songwriter-producer 4Rest has filed a copyright infringement suit against Chloe Baily and Parkwood Entertainment, alleging that 4Rest coauthored three of the songs on Chloe's album Trouble in Paradise, and she failed to secure his permission to include them on her album, or to give him appropriate credit or payment for his contributions. Read the complaint.

2/14/25: Invoke has registered a copyright in a work that it claims is the "first single image created entirely with AI-generated material" to secure a copyright registration. Jasmine found this video showing the creation of the image. Invoke has published an account of its successful efforts to persuade the Copyright Office to register its copyright by documenting a human's selection, arrangement, and coordination of AI-generated elements. (Invoke markets generative AI software that keeps track of user-driven edits.)

2/12/25: The Copyright Office has posted a Report on Identifying the Economic Implications of Artificial Intelligence for Copyright Policy: Context and Direction for Economic Research. reflecting contributions from the members of an ad hoc committee of economics scholars convened by the Copyright Office's chief economist.

2/11/25: Ross created legal research software that incorporated AI. It trained the AI model using data derived from Westlaw headnotes. Thomson Reuters filed a copyright infringement suit in 2020. This morning, 3d Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation as a district court judge for the District of Delaware, granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters on its claim for direct copyright infringement of the copyright in some of those headnotes. Ross had claimed that its use of West headnotes to train its AI model was fair use. Judge Bibas ruled that it was not. Read the opinion. Professor Matt Sag has posted a comment on his blog. The Authors Alliance's Xuanxiao Xu (Michigan JD 2016) has posted a critique of the decision on the Author's Alliance blog.
- - - 4/4/25 Update: Judge Bibas has certified an interlocutory appeal and postponed the trial previously scheduled for May 12 until the appeal is resolved.

2/11/25: There are about 20 or 30 lawsuits, some of them class actions, that allege that training generative AI on texts, images, or sounds, without the permission of the copyright owners in the works that contain those texts, images or sounds infringes those works' copyrights. One of the class actions is Kadrey v. Meta, brought by authors Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, David Henry Hwang and others claiming that Meta infringed their copyrights during the training of LLaMA. Aubrey calls our attention to a news article by Jowi Morales in Tom's Hardware reporting that court documents have revealed that Facebook employees used pirated torrents to download more than 81 terabytes of data from shadow libraries to use as training data.

2/7/25: Senators Marsha Blackburn, Alex Padilla, Cory Booker and Thom Tillis have (re)introduced the American Music Fairness Act, which would require terrestrial radio broadcasters to pay royalties to record labels for transmissions of sound recordings. As we will discover when we get to chapter 7, under current law, terrestrial radio broadcasters pay royalties for transmissions of musical works but not sound recordings. The bill would change that. The bill has been introduced in every recent Congress but failed to pass because of fierce opposition from the National Association of Broadcasters. Representative Darryl Issa has promised to introduce a similar bill in the House this week.

2/2/25: Joe Siegel and Jerry Shuster created Superman in 1933 and assigned their rights to National Comics in 1938 for $130. Siegel died in 1996 and Shuster died in 1992. During their lifetimes, both of them spent years in court seeking to reclaim their copyrights or secure additional compensation. After they died, both of their estates continued to pursue those efforts. On Friday, the executor of Shuster's estate filed a new lawsuit against DC Comics and Warner Entertainment claiming that the British, Australian, Irish, and Canadian copyrights to Superman had automatically reverted to Siegel and Shuster in 2017 and 2021 under laws that mandate automatic reversion 25 years after the author's death. Read the Complaint. A new Superman movie is scheduled to hit theaters in July.

1/29/25: The US Copyright Office has released its long-awaited policy study report on artificial intelligence and copyrightability. Read it here.

1/27/25: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has declared this week "Copyright Week." Check back each day for blog posts on copyright policy.

1/25/25: Italian director Francesca Gregorini sued M. Night Shyamalan for copyright infringement, claiming that his streaming series Servant infringes her 2013 film The Truth About Emanuel. Both works tell the story of a delusional parent who hires a nanny to take care of a baby doll that they believe to be a real infant. The case was tried to a jury which returned a verdict in favor of Shyamalan on Friday. J . Kim Murphy and Gene Maddeus reported the verdict for Variety.

1/13/25: Adore Plush toy company filed a copyright infringement suit against its competitor Texas Toy Distribution (TTD), claiming that four of TTD's plush stuffed animals were infringing copies of Adore's toys. On January 3, a District Court in Houston granted summary judgment to TTD on Adore's claims that TTD's stuffed bee, mosasaur, and gila monster toys infringed Adore's Buzzy, Moby, and Leo toys, but ruled that Adore's claim that TTD's bearded dragon toy infringes the copyright in Adore's Pogo should be decided by a jury. Read the opinion.

1/11/25: Five years ago, animator Buck Woodall sued Disney for copyright infringement, claiming that the film Moana infringed the copyright in Woodall's unproduced screenplay for an animated film titled Bucky. Last fall Woodall's action against Disney was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. Yesterday, Woodall filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit that claims that the movie Moana 2 infringes his copyright in Bucky. Read Winston Cho's story for the Hollywood Reporter.
- 3/12/25 UPDATE: The jury in the trial over the first Moana movie returned a verdict for Disney, concluding that Woodall had failed to show access to Bucky. Read Maia Spoto's and Aruni Soni's report for Bloomberg Law News.

1/10/25: Singer-songwriter Victory Boyd has sued Travis Scott, SZA, and Future, claiming that their 2023 hit Telekinesis infringes her unreleased 2019 song Like the Way it Sounds. Read Larisha Paul's story for Rolling Stone.

1/3/25: Evox sells stock images of cars. On Tuesday, it filed suit against the University of Michigan, Stanford, and Baylor Medical School claiming that the three universities copied Evox images without permission and included them in publicly available databases. Read the Complaint.

1/3/25: Music publishers Concord, Universal, Capitol, Polygram, and ABKCO sued Anthropic in 2023, claiming that Anthropic's use of lyrics from their copyrighted songs to train its generative AI system infringed their copyrights. The parties have reached a partial settlement under which Anthropic will implement guardrails that are designed to prevent its system from supplying output that copies the publishers' lyrics. Read Winston Cho's story for the Hollywood Reporter.