By , June 13, 2025.

Say ‘No’ to Unlicensed AI Training! — The Copyright Alliance kicked off a grassroots AI campaign that encourages the public to send letters to Members of Congress and President Trump in anticipation of the administration releasing its AI Action Plan in mid-July 2025. The letters urge elected officials to protect the rights and livelihoods of creators by rejecting laws and policies that would allow AI companies to train on their work without consent and compensation. Those interested in participating may use the letters “as is,” revise them, or write their own.

London AI firm says Getty copyright case poses ‘overt threat’ to industry — “Getty’s case against Stability AI for copyright and trademark infringement relating to its vast photography archives reached the high court in London on Monday.” Bonus content—IPKitten has a series of posts covering the legal issues raised in the lawsuit: UK trial begins… (Part 1), Part 2 – copyright and database right, Part 3 – Defences.

In first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Hollywood giants sue AI firm for copyright infringement — “Many companies have gone after AI firms for copyright infringement, such as The New York Times (which sued OpenAI and Microsoft), Sony Music Entertainment (which filed a suit against AI song generator startups Suno and Udio) and Getty Images (against Stability AI). But this is the first time major Hollywood players have joined the fight against the AI landscape.”

AI-driven system helps cut copyright disputes in Textile City — “China’s Textile City, the world’s largest textile distribution hub located in Keqiao, handles about a quarter of the global fabric trade and exports textile products to more than 190 countries and regions. The bustling business also sees frequent disputes related to fabric patterns, said Li Zisu, vice-president of the Keqiao District People’s Court. She revealed that between 2008 and 2020, more than 5,000 merchants were involved in pattern-related lawsuits, and said that the biggest challenge in handling these cases was determining ownership of the pattern copyright.”

Italy probes Meta over music copyright negotiations — “The Italian Competition Authority said it was probing Meta’s alleged abuse of economic dependence of the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE), the public authority charged with protecting artists’ copyright in Italy. The SIAE had a contract with Meta that expired in December 2022.”

By , May 30, 2025.

Getty Images spending millions to battle a ‘world of rhetoric’ in AI suit, CEO says — “Technology startups like OpenAI, Anthropic and Mistral have flourished by taking vast amounts of data from the open web and using it to train their foundational AI models, which can produce lifelike texts, images and videos. However, the strategies of these firms have raised concerns over their use of copyrighted material. Several lawsuits have targeted AI firms over alleged copyright infringements from The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI to several U.S. record labels’ claims against AI music generation services Suno and Udio.”

Generative AI’s Illusory Case for Fair Use — “Despite wide employment of anthropomorphic terms to describe their behavior, AI machines do not learn or reason as humans do. Instead, they employ an algorithmic process to store the works they are fed during the training process. They do not ‘know’ anything independently of the works on which they are trained, so their output is a function of the copied materials… The exploitation of expressive content to produce new expressive content sharply distinguishes AI copying from the copying at issue in the technological fair use cases relied upon by AI’s fair use advocates.”

Car in Gone in Sixty Seconds is not entitled to copyright protection — “Prior Ninth Circuit precedent, DC Comics v. Towle, 802 F.3d 1012 (9th Cir. 2015), establishes a test to determine whether a character is entitled to copyright protection: (1) the character must have ‘physical as well as conceptual qualities,’ (2) the character must be ‘sufficiently delineated to be recognizable as the same character whenever it appears’ and display ‘consistent, identifiable character traits and attributes,’ and (3) the character must be ‘especially distinctive’ and contain ‘some unique elements of expression.’ The Eleanor character failed all three parts of the test, the court of appeals found.”

Judge Rejects Ex-Copyright Chief’s Bid to Pause Trump Firing — “Even if Perlmutter was likely to succeed on the merits, [Judge] Kelly said his analysis was pinned on the irreparable harm threshold required to grant the order and Perlmutter did not meet that requirement. Perlmutter’s argument of irreparable harm rested on the idea that she was deprived of the statutory right to function as the register of copyrights, Kelly said. Recent court decisions from the US Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit have been ‘skeptical’ of that argument, the judge said.”

The ‘beige Amazon influencer’ lawsuit is headed for dismissal — “The lawsuit was simultaneously disconcerting and benign, eerie and borderline comical: the story of two women whose lives had begun to resemble each other’s via social media platforms made for a compelling storylineThe cream, white, and beige aesthetic of their content (and lives) meant that the essence of what was allegedly infringed was commonplace, even basic — but the similarities, documented over dozens of examples submitted to the court, were strange nonetheless”

By , May 28, 2025.

Many of the leading artificial intelligence developers have trained their generative AI models on copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright owners. As courts and the Copyright Office have examined whether such use should be allowed under fair use, some have considered the fact that these tools can quickly generate works that may not be similar in the legal copyright sense to the training works, but nevertheless compete with the original works because they are close substitutes. Recognizing this harm under fair use is not, as some have responded, an improper expansion of the scope of copyright protection. Rather, it is a reasonable calibration of a purposefully flexible doctrine to a novel technology.

Kadrey v. Meta

Earlier this month, lawyers for a group of authors squared off against lawyers for Meta in front of Judge Chhabria in a federal district court in California to argue about whether the use of copyrighted works without permission from the copyright owner to train a generative AI models should be allowed under the law. There have been over 40 lawsuits filed since January 2023 from copyright owners against various AI developers over this issue. Kadrey v. Meta is the first one to reach a hearing on the merits of the copyright and fair use issues.

Fair use, of course, requires courts to consider and balance four factors to determine whether the use of a copyrighted work that would otherwise be infringing should be permitted. The fourth factor, “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”, is the most important factor,1 Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508, 555 (2023); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 574 (1994); Harper & Row, Publrs. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 566 (1985) (“This last factor is undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use”). and it typically involves courts looking at whether the new use would usurp sales or licenses of the original work, or undermine markets for derivative works.

During the hearing Judge Chhabria carefully and thoughtfully prodded the lawyers on their arguments. While questioning Meta’s attorney, Chhabria focused in on the ability of generative AI models to quickly produce coherent and humanlike textual material, a function that courts have not yet considered in a fair use case—and he asked why the impact of this feature should not be considered under the fourth fair use factor.

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” said Chhabria. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person. I just don’t understand how that can be fair use.”2Blake Brittain, Judge in Meta Case Warns AI Could ‘Obliterate’ Market for Original Works, Reuters (May 1, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-meta-case-weighs-key-question-ai-copyright-lawsuits-2025-05-01/.

Copyright Office

Shortly afterward, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a pre-publication version of its report on copyright and artificial intelligence, covering generative AI training. Like Judge Chhabria, the Office considered the impact of generative AI outputs generally on the market of individual copyrighted works. It concluded, among other things, that courts should consider the harms caused where a generative AI model’s outputs, even if not substantially similar to a specific copyrighted work, compete in the market for that type of work. The Office rejected calls to read the fourth fair use factor too narrowly.

The statute on its face encompasses any “effect” upon the potential market. The speed and scale at which AI systems generate content pose a serious risk of diluting markets for works of the same kind as in their training data. That means more competition for sales of an author’s works and more difficulty for audiences in finding them. If thousands of AI-generated romance novels are put on the market, fewer of the human-authored romance novels that the AI was trained on are likely to be sold. Royalty pools can also be diluted.

“Market dilution”

Professor Pam Samuelson has said, “Congress expected the fair use doctrine to evolve when it passed the 1976 Act, and evolve it certainly has.”3Pamela Samuelson, Possible Futures of Fair Use, 90 Wash. L. Rev. 815, 863-64 (2015). It makes sense that the doctrine’s evolution would continue when confronted with the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models, a use that is not closely analogous with uses in existing fair use precedent.

Almost immediately after release of the Copyright Office report, there was a strand of criticism of the Office’s “market dilution” conclusion that, as I discuss below, misconstrues (inadvertantly, perhaps) the fair use framework. The result is an argument that may seem superficially compelling but upon closer examination is a logical fallacy.

The following are presented as illustrative examples of this argument:

  • Granting copyright holders the ability to stop AI’s generative function because it creates new, noninfringing works would expand the limited monopoly of copyright far beyond its permissible bounds. … copyright is limited to infringement of specific works—and does not give any right to copyright holders to monopolize methods for creation or to prevent general competition in the marketplace presented by noninfringing but competing works.4Edward Lee, Fair Use and the Origin of AI Training (February 01, 2025). Houston Law Review (forthcoming 2025).
  • The ‘market dilution’ theory is definitely novel — and inconsistent with what SCOTUS has held to be the proper scope of the copyright monopoly. An author cannot get a vague proprietary claim to the whole market for a particular type of work simply by producing individual works of that type.5Annemarie Bridy (@annemariebridy), Bluesky (May 21, 2025), https://bsky.app/profile/annemariebridy.bsky.social/post/3lot4u3ej2k2c.

Essentially, the argument states that allowing courts to consider market dilution under the fourth fair use factor is synonymous with extending an author’s exclusive rights over competing but noninfringing works.

This is a classic strawman argument. The rebuttals are correct in stating that copyright protection does not extend beyond infringement of the specific work. The flaw is conflating the scope of infringement with the fair use analysis.

The copyright owner’s complaint against AI developers is that their work was used without permission to train an AI model. Their prima facie claim is complete when it’s been shown that a developer has encroached on one of the exclusive rights protected by copyright, a showing that is easily established, given that the training process will involve at least one reproduction of a copyrighted work.6U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Part III – The Use of Copyrighted Works in Training AI Models 26 (Pre-Publication Version) (2024). That’s it. The only thing left at that point, absent an affirmative defense, is to determine remedies.

Fair use is an affirmative defense.7Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v.
Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508, 547 n.21 (2023); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 590 (1994); Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 560 (1985).
The burden of proof is on the defendant.8This is a fundamental principle that has been established since ancient times. See, e.g., Dig. 22.3.2 (Ulpian, Ad Edictum 69) (“Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.”). As part of that defense, a defendant must show that “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work” has not prejudiced the copyright owner.

In other words, in this context, the copyright owner is not asserting a claim that the scope of their copyright enables them to block competing but non-infringing works. They are asserting simply that an AI developer has copied their work for training, which constitutes infringement. It is the AI developer who is claiming that this use should nevertheless be excused despite the clear prejudice it will cause authors of the original works.

While novel, I think it’s reasonable to consider the impact that a tool that can generate a nearly limitless number of non-infringing but competing outputs will have on the market for the original work when analyzing whether to allow the use of the work without permission. I think the statute is even broader in this regard than the Copyright Office suggests in its discussion. The statute not only encompasses any effect on the potential market, it also encompasses any effect on the “value of the copyrighted work.” Both the markets for and value of works could be obliterated by generative AI outputs.

The consideration of “market dilution” under the fourth fair use factor is thus not an expansion of copyright’s scope but a careful calibration of the privilege to use copyrighted works without permission to ensure that the use does not prejudice the rights of creators and undermine the public interest.

References

References
1 Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508, 555 (2023); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 574 (1994); Harper & Row, Publrs. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 566 (1985) (“This last factor is undoubtedly the single most important element of fair use”).
2 Blake Brittain, Judge in Meta Case Warns AI Could ‘Obliterate’ Market for Original Works, Reuters (May 1, 2025), https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/judge-meta-case-weighs-key-question-ai-copyright-lawsuits-2025-05-01/.
3 Pamela Samuelson, Possible Futures of Fair Use, 90 Wash. L. Rev. 815, 863-64 (2015).
4 Edward Lee, Fair Use and the Origin of AI Training (February 01, 2025). Houston Law Review (forthcoming 2025).
5 Annemarie Bridy (@annemariebridy), Bluesky (May 21, 2025), https://bsky.app/profile/annemariebridy.bsky.social/post/3lot4u3ej2k2c.
6 U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence: Part III – The Use of Copyrighted Works in Training AI Models 26 (Pre-Publication Version) (2024).
7 Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v.
Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508, 547 n.21 (2023); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 590 (1994); Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 560 (1985).
8 This is a fundamental principle that has been established since ancient times. See, e.g., Dig. 22.3.2 (Ulpian, Ad Edictum 69) (“Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat.”).
By , May 23, 2025.

Judge Hints Anthropic’s AI Training on Books is Fair Use — “Anthropic’s use of notorious digital piracy websites raised concerns for Alsup. In response, the company’s counsel, Joseph Richard Farris of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, argued the Supreme Court has been skeptical whether bad faith has any effect on the fair use analysis. Alsup pushed back, saying ‘I have a hard time seeing that you can commit what is ordinarily a crime, but get exonerated because you end up using it for a transformative use.'”

Copyright Alliance CEO and Others Resign from ALI’s Copyright Restatement Project — “In a statement issued today, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid announced that he, along with numerous other advisers and liaisons, have resigned from the American Law Institute’s (ALI) Restatement of Copyright Law (Restatement) project, effective immediately. The resignations follow those of four prominent law professors earlier this week.”

Top copyright official sues Trump over firing — “As head of the nation’s copyright office, Perlmutter would have overseen registering copyright claims and maintaining records about copyright ownership. The office functioned within the Library of Congress by providing the copyright deposits that make up a significant part of the library’s collections. The copyright office is also responsible for conducting studies and advising Congress on copyright issues, including regarding the growing generative artificial intelligence industry.”

Photographer Loses Copyright Lawsuit Claiming Lil Nas X Stole His Poses — “Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the competing Instagram posts had only a handful of minor similarities, which were not enough to constitute copyright infringement. The court also concluded that the poses and themes featured in Woodland’s photos are not protected under copyright law.”

Does Human Learning equal Machine Learning? High Court of Delhi to rule on lawfulness of TDM for Machine Learning — “While dozens of US District Courts are currently grappling with the question of whether AI training with protected works constitutes fair use, the UK High Court is largely grappling with jurisdictional questions, and EU courts are mainly concerned with the modalities of rights reservations … it is now the High Court of Delhi’s turn. “

By , May 16, 2025.

US Copyright Office Releases Highly Anticipated Report on Generative AI Training – Here’s What It Actually Says — “The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) recently released its highly anticipated Report on Generative AI Training (the third and final part in the USCO’s AI and copyright series) in a pre-publication format. At a time when headlines dominate, and despite the leadership changes underway at the USCO, the report represents a substantial body of work and analysis that explores how copyright law applies to the training of generative AI systems with a level of nuance that reflects the expertise of its drafters and a clear understanding of the importance of both the copyright and AI sectors to the broader innovation ecosystem.”

Leading Scholars Insist Their Names Be Removed from the ALI Restatement of Copyright Law — “Four luminaries of copyright law and scholarship submitted a letter to the American Law Institute (ALI) formally withdrawing their names as Advisers from the Restatement of Copyright Law, approval of which is set to be voted on next week. Professors Shyam Balganesh, Jane Ginsburg, and Peter Menell, along with attorney David Nimmer submitted the May 12 letter conveying strong disagreement with both the substance of the Restatement and the subterfuge in the process.”

AI-Powered News Piracy Site Blocked By ISPs After Court Sides With Publishers — “A joint investigation by Libération and Next revealed that at least 1,000 similar sites churn out infringing content in much the same way. In some cases, AI ‘hallucinations’ aren’t noticed by site operators or the public, resulting in bogus automated news being taken as fact, then cited as source material for articles published on Wikipedia.”

Anthropic expert accused of using AI-fabricated source in copyright case — “A federal judge in San Jose, California, on Tuesday ordered artificial intelligence company Anthropic to respond to allegations that it submitted a court filing containing a ‘hallucination’ created by AI as part of its defense against copyright claims by a group of music publishers. A lawyer representing Universal Music Group, Concord and ABKCO in a lawsuit over Anthropic’s alleged misuse of their lyrics to train its chatbot Claude told U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen at a hearing that an Anthropic data scientist cited a nonexistent academic article to bolster the company’s argument in a dispute over evidence.”

EUIPO releases study on generative artificial intelligence and copyright — The U.S. Copyright Office was not the only public body to release a major report on AI and copyright this week. On Monday, the European Union Intellectual Property Office published a comprehensive study on the topic, the purpose of which “is to deepen the general understanding of GenAI’s technical functioning, as well as existing and developing solutions underlying the application of EU rules on copyright and Artificial Intelligence. The study offers an in-depth analysis of GenAI developments from the perspective of EU copyright law, covering technical, legal, and economic aspects.”

By , May 09, 2025.

Glaring Omissions from the Kadrey v. Meta Hearing — “…the hearing included little or no discussion of three key points that must be considered as part of any AI training fair use analysis: (1) under the first factor, whether the use was commercial or transformative and the ultimate purpose of the output, (2) the effect of Warhol v. Goldsmith on transformativeness and justification, and (3) the robust and growing market for AI licensing.”

Judge on Meta’s AI training: “I just don’t understand how that can be fair use” — “‘You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,’ Chhabria said. ‘You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.'”

AAP’s Annual Meeting: Stark Comment on AI and Copyright — “We need to acknowledge the stakes here and recognize the fight we’re in. This is a battle taking place in the public square, on university campuses, and in global capitals all around the world. Our opponents are lobbying for AI exceptions to copyright for national security reasons that will turn over our global IP leadership to bad actors and nation-states that have the exact opposite effect as intended by beginning a rapid race to the bottom.”

Copyright after Loper Bright: New Challenges for the Copyright Office? — “While Loper Bright overrules Chevron deference and reasserts the judiciary’s primary role in statutory interpretation, its impact on copyright law is likely to be limited. Courts have historically applied Chevron sparingly in this area, often relying instead on direct statutory interpretation or the Skidmore framework. Even in cases where Chevron was invoked, courts frequently engaged in their own independent analysis or found clear congressional delegations of authority to administrative bodies.”

India panel to review copyright law amid legal challenges to OpenAI — “The memo, which is not public, said the commerce ministry set up a panel of eight experts last month to examine issues related to AI and their implications for India’s copyright law. The experts have been tasked to ‘identify and analyze the legal and policy issues arising from the use of artificial intelligence in the context of copyright,’ the memo added.”

By , May 02, 2025.

Judge in Meta case warns AI could ‘obliterate’ market for original works — “‘You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,’ Chhabria told Meta’s attorneys. ‘You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person. I just don’t understand how that can be fair use,’ Chhabria said.”

Top 10 Noteworthy Copyright Stories in April 2025 — The Copyright Alliance’s Rachel Kim provides a rundown of top copyright developments in courts, Congress, federal agencies, and beyond.

Can You Copyright A Met Gala Outfit — “In advance of this year’s event, NYU News spoke with NYU School of Law professor Douglas Hand, who teaches a course on fashion law, about how these outfits are legally protected, the most important copyright issues in high-end fashion, and how students can apply what they learn in a fashion law course.”

Just-Announced Canadian Journalism Payments Show Proof of Concept for JCPA, Similar US Bills — “Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said, ‘… Publishers deserve to be compensated when major tech platforms profit from their work, and Canada’s example proves that this model will work for publishers in the United States and start to reverse the damage that the Big Tech platforms have wreaked on the American news ecosystem.'”

Ministers to amend data bill amid artists’ concerns over AI and copyright — “Artists including Paul McCartney and Tom Stoppard have thrown their weight behind a campaign against the changes in a series of high-level interventions. Elton John said the reforms rode ‘roughshod over the traditional copyright laws that protect artists’ livelihoods.’ Ministers want to allow AI companies to use copyrighted works to train their models without permission, unless the copyright holder opts out of the process. Creatives say that this favours AI companies and want them to follow current copyright laws.”

By , April 25, 2025.

U.S. Copyright Office Releases New Copyright Registration Toolkit — “As part of the Copyright Office’s Copyright for All initiative, the toolkit is a visual breakdown of copyright, including essential information about copyright law, how to prepare for copyright registration, what to expect during the process, and post-registration considerations.”

As Industry Demands AI Licensing Frameworks, Emerging Tech Can Help — “The panelists identified multiple advantages beyond monetary compensation for content owners who engage with AI companies. Campbell explained that licensing leads to collaboration: ‘You actually end up collaborating with that company around innovation. New things come out on product side [and] engineering side…through these partnerships.’ He added that licensing must be voluntary, not compulsory, the latter of which risks prompting AI companies to ‘pull back and stifles innovation.'”

IGN and CNET owner Ziff Davis sues OpenAI — “In the lawsuit, the digital media company accuses OpenAI of ‘intentionally and relentlessly’ creating ‘exact copies’ of its outlets’ works without permission. The company also alleges that OpenAI trained its AI models on its work despite Ziff Davis instructing web crawlers not to scrape its data using a robots.txt file, adding that OpenAI allegedly removed copyright information from the content it sucks up.”

Let’s not Zuck up, the existential struggle is on — “This now feels like an existential struggle. It is about how we value our creative output, what others see in what we do and how we stand up for it. It is also about the rule of law. In public, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that creatives exaggerate the worth of their content. But, in private, the company acts like it can’t find its wallet after a restaurant meal.”

OpenAI’s most capable models hallucinate more than earlier ones — “Hallucinations, which refer to fabricated claims, studies, and even URLs, have continued to plague even the most cutting-edge advancements in AI. There is currently no perfect solution for preventing or identifying them, though OpenAI has tried some approaches.”

By , April 18, 2025.

AI Licensing Startups Bloom in Wake of Copyright Legal Battles — “Created by Humans recently launched a platform that lets tech firms shop for author-sanctioned catalogs of books. Narrativ has built a marketplace for voice actors to license their likenesses and entered into an agreement with labor union SAG-AFTRA. And Prorata, whose tools can help break down AI outputs to compensate each contributor, has partnered with over 400 publications since August, including Fortune, The Atlantic and Axel Springer, as well as Universal Music Group.”

Copyright Case Between Deborah Roberts and Richard Beavers Gallery ‘Amicably Resolved’ — “A judge ultimately determined that of the 16 works presented as evidence in the case, 9 did not amount to copyright infringement, however the remaining 7 bear such a degree of similarity that a ‘total concept and feel of each collage is sufficiently similar to defeat a motion to dismiss.’ The case was allowed to proceed.”

Shedding Light: Briefs Filed in Kadrey v. Meta — “As we see in the shorthand of social media, the developers write their own dichotomy by simultaneously humanizing and dehumanizing their products. In one breath, they compare machine leaning (ML) to human learning but then drop the analogy when they seek to claim that the protected ‘expression’ in the works used is not copied or stored by their mysterious and complex ‘training’ models. The AAP brief argues that copying ‘expression’ is central to training an LLM, and the professors’ brief shows why ‘learning like a human’ is precisely why fair use does not exempt Meta from obtaining licenses.”

EU copyright law roundup – first trimester of 2025 — “Slightly overdue, but here comes the first roundup of 2025. The EU courts have issued just one judgment in this trimester, but to make up for it, there have been several interesting policy initiatives.”

Meta says it will resume AI training with public content from European users — “The company’s AI training efforts had been hampered by stringent European Union data privacy laws, which give people control over how their personal information is used. Vienna-based group NOYB, led by activist Max Schrems, had complained to various national privacy watchdogs about Meta’s AI training plans and urged them to stop the company before it started training its next generation of AI models.”

By , April 11, 2025.

Internet Archive vs. Music Labels: $600m+ Copyright Rift Edges Toward Settlement — “The Internet Archive’s ‘Great 78 Project’ digitizes historical recordings to preserve musical heritage, but in 2023 the initiative led to major record labels filing a copyright lawsuit. The financial stakes soared last month when the labels proposed to update their claim to $693 million in statutory damages. A recent filing suggests that due to significant progress in settlement discussions, it may not come to that.”

Photographer Asks Supreme Court to Decide if Embedded Instagram Posts Infringe Copyright — “In his lawsuit, McGucken accused thetravel.com of infringing his copyright in 36 photographs by embedding them without permission from his Instagram page over multiple articles. If thetravel.com had made new copies of McGucken’s photographs and uploaded them on its website, it would have been a straightforward case of copyright infringement. However, the website displayed the images by embedding them directly from McGucken’s Instagram page. While Instagram does not grant permission for companies to embed these images, a 2007 Ninth Circuit ruling known as the ‘server test’ established that when an image remains on a third party’s server and is not stored on the infringer’s computer, embedding it does not count as a new display.”

Copyright in Brazil in 2025: What to Expect? — “The availability of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems, particularly with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, marks a new technological era and has catalyzed this renewed attention. Thus, old issues merge with new discussions, fueling an essential debate that we hope will be addressed constructively. Here, we highlight some key topics to follow in 2025.”

OpenAI’s models ‘memorized’ copyrighted content, new study suggests — “Models are prediction engines. Trained on a lot of data, they learn patterns — that’s how they’re able to generate essays, photos, and more. Most of the outputs aren’t verbatim copies of the training data, but owing to the way models ‘learn,’ some inevitably are. Image models have been found to regurgitate screenshots from movies they were trained on, while language models have been observed effectively plagiarizing news articles.”

Judge calls out OpenAI’s ‘straw man’ argument in New York Times copyright suit — “Essentially, the judge agreed with the NYT that OpenAI has not yet provided any evidence that the newspaper knew how ChatGPT would perform until the product was out in the wild. Therefore, he denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss those claims as time-barred, while denouncing as a ‘straw man’ an OpenAI argument that the NYT, “as a ‘sophisticated publisher,’ had a duty ‘to take prompt action after being put on notice of what it now claims to be alleged infringement.'”