AMANDA ROBERT, ABA Journal; ChatGPT creator must turn over 20M chat logs in copyright litigation, federal judge says
"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, must turn over 20 million chat logs in its copyright litigation with the New York Times and other news media, a federal judge ruled Monday."
Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang sufficiently considered privacy concerns against the material’s relevance to the ongoing litigation in her discovery ruling in favor of news organization plaintiffs in five lawsuits, District Judge Sidney H. Stein said in an order Monday. She rejected OpenAI’s arguments it should be allowed to run a search of the 20 million-log sample and produce conversations implicating the plaintiffs’ works, saying no case law requires the court to order the least burdensome discovery possible."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; AI copyright battles enter pivotal year as US courts weigh fair use
"The sprawling legal fight over tech companies' vast copying of copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence systems could be entering a decisive phase in 2026.
After a string of fresh lawsuits and a landmark settlement in 2025, the new year promises to bring a wave of rulings that could define how U.S. copyright law applies to generative AI. At stake is whether companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta can rely on the legal doctrine of fair use to shield themselves from liability – or if they must reimburse copyright holders, which could cost billions."
"The studios’ said they’d engaged specialists in Singapore and China and were informed service could take eight to 24 months."
In the coming months, we’ll see decisions in two key cases: whether Anthropic PBC’s historic $1.5 billion copyright settlement with authors will receive final approval and if music publishers’ separate copyright lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company will head to trial in September.
Here’s a closer look at the California legal battles that could redefine the landscape of IP law next year."
KLAUDIA JAŹWIŃSKA, Columbia Journalism Review; Lawsuit or License?
"Today, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism is releasing a tracker that monitors developments between news publishers and AI companies—including lawsuits, deals, and grants—based on publicly available information."
Sophia Hou, The Red & Black; Major AI copyright lawsuit settlement involves University of Georgia Press authors
"Under the terms of the settlement, Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion, which will be divided among class members whose claims are submitted and approved. This payout amounts to up to $3000 per work. Class members include all legal and beneficial copyright owners of the books included in the Anthropic copyright settlement website’s searchable database. The settlement administrator is currently notifying authors and publishers who may be the legal or beneficial copyright owners of these books.
Among the books listed in the settlement database were hundreds of books published by UGA Press...
Following initial court approval, the settlement will undergo a fairness hearing and any potential appeals before a final decision is made. The deadline to submit a claim form is March 23, 2026. Copyright owners who want to file individual lawsuits against Anthropic have the choice to opt out of the settlement by Jan. 7, 2026.
As one of the first major class action lawsuits involving AI and copyright in the U.S., this settlement has the potential to shape future legal debates over AI and intellectual property."
BEATRICE NOLAN, Fortune; Anthropic’s settlement with authors may be the ‘first domino to fall’ in AI copyright battles
"The amount of the settlement was not immediately disclosed, but legal experts not involved in the case said the figure could easily reach into the hundreds of millions. It’s also still unclear how the settlement will be distributed among various copyright holders, which could include large publishing houses as well as individual authors.
The case was the first certified class action against an AI company over the use of copyrighted materials, and the quick settlement, which came just one month after the judge ruled the case could proceed to trial as a class action, is a win for the authors, according to legal experts."
RACHEL SCHARF, Billboard ; What Book Authors’ AI Copyright Court Losses Mean for the Music Business
While the first copyright rulings have come out on the side of AI platforms, this is hardly a death knell for the music giants' lawsuits against Suno, Udio and Anthropic, legal experts say.
PETE PACHAL, Fast Company; Why the new rulings on AI copyright might actually be good news for publishers
"The outcomes of both cases were more mixed than the headlines suggest, and they are also deeply instructive. Far from closing the door on copyright holders, they point to places where litigants might find a key...
Taken together, the three cases point to a clearer path forward for publishers building copyright cases against Big AI:
Focus on outputs instead of inputs: It’s not enough that someone hoovered up your work. To build a solid case, you need to show that what the AI company did with it reproduced it in some form. So far, no court has definitively decided whether AI outputs are meaningfully different enough to count as “transformative” in the eyes of copyright law, but it should be noted that courts have ruled in the past that copyright violation can occur even when small parts of the work are copied—ifthose parts represent the “heart” of the original.
Show market harm: This looks increasingly like the main battle. Now that we have a lot of data on how AI search engines and chatbots—which, to be clear, are outputs—are affecting the online behavior of news consumers, the case that an AI service harms the media market is easier to make than it was a year ago. In addition, the emergence of licensing deals between publishers and AI companies is evidence that there’s market harm by creating outputs without offering such a deal.
Question source legitimacy: Was the content legally acquired or pirated? The Anthropic case opens this up as a possible attack vector for publishers. If they can prove scraping occurred through paywalls—without subscribing first—that could be a violation even absent any outputs."
