OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says; Reuters, November 11, 2025

 Jörn Poltz and Friederike Heine, Reuters ; OpenAI used song lyrics in violation of copyright laws, German court says

"OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by reproducing lyrics from songs by best-selling musician Herbert Groenemeyer and others, a court ruled on Tuesday, in a closely watched case against the U.S. firm over its use of lyrics to train its language models.

The regional court in Munich found that the company trained its AI on protected content from nine German songs, including Groenemeyer's hits "Maenner" and "Bochum"."

Stability AI’s legal win over Getty leaves copyright law in limbo; The Verge, November 5, 2025

Robert Hart , The Verge; Stability AI’s legal win over Getty leaves copyright law in limbo

"Stability AI, the creator of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, was largely victorious against Getty Images on Tuesday in a British legal battle over the material used to train AI models. The case originally looked set to produce a landmark ruling on AI and copyright in the UK, but it landed with a thud and failed to set any clear precedent for the big question dividing AI companies and creative firms: whether AI models need permission to train on copyrighted works.

The case, first filed in 2023, is the first major AI copyright claim to reach England’s High Court, though the verdict offers little clarity to other AI companies and rightsholders."

AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim; The Guardian, November 4, 2025

Robert Booth , The Guardian; AI firm wins high court ruling after photo agency’s copyright claim

"A London-based artificial intelligence firm has won a landmark high court case examining the legality of AI models using vast troves of copyrighted data without permission.

Stability AI, whose directors include the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Avatar, James Cameron, successfully resisted a claim from Getty Images that it had infringed the international photo agency’s copyright.

The ruling is seen as a blow to copyright owners’ exclusive right to reap the rewards of their work, with one senior lawyer, Rebecca Newman, a legal director at Addleshaw Goddard, warning it means “the UK’s secondary copyright regime is not strong enough to protect its creators”."

Japanese Companies Tell OpenAI to Stop Infringing On Its IP; Gizmodo, November 2, 2025

JUSTIN CARTER , Gizmodo; Japanese Companies Tell OpenAI to Stop Infringing On Its IP

"The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), which represents several major Japanese entertainment companies such as TV studio Toei and game developer Square Enix, recently sent a written request calling on OpenAI to end its unauthorized use of their IP to train its recently launched Sora 2 generative AI.

Nearly 20 co-signers have accused the tech company of copyright infringement, alleging a “large portion” of Sora 2 content “closely resembles Japanese content or images [as] a result of using Japanese content as machine learning data.” The letter mentioned OpenAI’s policy of using copyrighted works unless the owner explicitly asks to opt out, but argues under Japanese law, it should instead be an opt-in system, since permission for copyrighted works is generally required beforehand."

‘Progressive’ Tech Group Asks Trump to Block AI Copyright Cases; The American Prospect, October 31, 2025

 DAVID DAYEN, The American Prospect; ‘Progressive’ Tech Group Asks Trump to Block AI Copyright Cases

"The Chamber of Progress, a self-styled “progressive” industry trade group supported by most of the biggest tech platforms, has urged the Trump administration to intervene in a litany of copyright cases involving artificial intelligence firms, to try to stop authors and publishers from having their work used for training AI models without permission.

The pleading comes as Anthropic prepares to pay authors $1.5 billion, the largest award in the history of copyright law, for pirating their work, in a settlement announced last month. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are named defendants in the more than 50 active lawsuits over AI intellectual-property theft.

In a letter to Michael Kratsios, the lead science adviser to President Trump, the Chamber of Progress estimates that AI companies could be liable under the Copyright Act for up to $1.5 trillion for stealing copyrighted work on which to train their models. The letter’s authors claim that this represents “an existential risk” to AI companies, and that the cases should be tossed out under a “fair use” standard.

The Chamber of Progress’s campaign to promote fair use, which they have created a campaign around called “Generate and Create,” comes as at least three of the nonprofit organization’s past or current backers are being sued over copyright claims: Meta, Google, and the AI art generator Midjourney. Another current funder, Nvidia, relies heavily on AI development for its continued success, and venture capital firm a16z, with several AI startups in its portfolio, also funds the nonprofit."

OpenAI loses bid to dismiss part of US authors' copyright lawsuit; Reuters, October 28, 2025

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; OpenAI loses bid to dismiss part of US authors' copyright lawsuit

"A New York federal judge has denied OpenAI's early request to dismiss authors' claims that text generated by OpenAI's artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT infringes their copyrights.

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein said on Monday that the authors may be able to prove the text ChatGPT produces is similar enough to their work to violate their book copyrights."

Federal government rules out changing copyright law to give AI companies free rein; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, October 26, 2025

Maani Truu, Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Federal government rules out changing copyright law to give AI companies free rein

"In short: 

The government has definitively ruled out introducing a copyright exemption for artificial intelligence companies training their models on Australian creative works.

Such a carve-out has been fiercely rejected by the creative sector, after it was floated in a Productivity Commission report.

What's next?

A government working group on artificial intelligence and copyright will meet over the next two days to examine whether the current laws need a refresh."

It’s Still Ludicrously Easy to Generate Copyrighted Characters on ChatGPT; Futurism, October 18, 2025

 Frank Landymore, Futurism; It’s Still Ludicrously Easy to Generate Copyrighted Characters on ChatGPT

"Forget Sora for just a second, because it’s still ludicrously easy to generate copyrighted characters using ChatGPT.

These include characters that the AI initially refuses to generate due to existing copyright, underscoring how OpenAI is clearly aware of how bad this looks — but is either still struggling to rein in its tech, figures it can get away with playing fast and loose with copyright law, or both.

When asked to “generate a cartoon image of Snoopy,” for instance, GPT-5 says it “can’t create or recreate copyrighted characters” — but it does offer to generate a “beagle-styled cartoon dog inspired by Snoopy’s general aesthetic.” Wink wink.

We didn’t go down that route, because even slightly rephrasing the request allowed us to directly get a pic of the iconic Charles Schultz character. “Generate a cartoon image of Snoopy in his original style,” we asked — and with zero hesitation, ChatGPT produced the spitting image of the “Peanuts” dog, looking like he was lifted straight from a page of the comic-strip."

‘Every kind of creative discipline is in danger’: Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI; The Guardian, October 20, 2025

 Nadia Khomami  , The Guardian; ‘Every kind of creative discipline is in danger’: Lincoln Lawyer author on the dangers of AI

"The writer has his own battles with AI. He is part of a collective of authors, including Jonathan Franzen, Jodi Picoult and John Grisham, suing OpenAI for copyright infringement...

Connelly has pledged $1m (£746m) to combat the wave of book bans sweeping through his home state of Florida. He said he felt moved to do something after he learned that Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, which had been influential to him, was temporarily removed from classrooms in Palm Beach County.

“I had to read that book to be what I am today. I would have never written a Lincoln Lawyer without it,” he said. He was also struck when Stephen Chbosky’s coming of age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower, “which meant a lot to my daughter”, received a ban.

He and his wife, Linda McCaleb, help fund PEN America’s Miami office countering book bans. “It’s run by a lawyer who then tries to step in, usually by filing injunctions against school boards,” he said. “I don’t believe anyone has any right to tell some other kid they can’t read something, to usurp another parent’s oversight of their children.”"

The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools; The Guardian, October 18, 2025

 Dan Milmo , The Guardian; The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools

"The US tech platform Vermillio tracks use of a client’s intellectual property online and claims it is possible to trace, approximately, the percentage to which an AI generated image has drawn on pre-existing copyrighted material."

AI’s Copyright War Could Be Its Undoing. Only the US Can End It.; Bloomberg, October 14, 2025

Dave Lee, Bloomberg; AI’s Copyright War Could Be Its Undoing. Only the US Can End It.

 "Whether creatives like Ulvaeus are entitled to any payment from AI companies is one of the sector’s most pressing and consequential questions. It’s being asked not just by Ulvaeus and fellow musicians including Elton John, Dua Lipa and Paul McCartney, but also by authors, artists, filmmakers, journalists and any number of others whose work has been fed into the models that power generative AI — tools that are now valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars."

OpenAI’s Sora Is in Serious Trouble; Futurism, October 10, 2025

Victor Tangermann, Futurism ; OpenAI’s Sora Is in Serious Trouble

"The cat was already out of the bag, though, sparking what’s likely to be immense legal drama for OpenAI. On Monday, the Motion Picture Association, a US trade association that represents major film studios, released a scorching statementurging OpenAI to “take immediate and decisive action” to stop the app from infringing on copyrighted media.

Meanwhile, OpenAI appears to have come down hard on what kind of text prompts can be turned into AI slop on Sora, implementing sweeping new guardrails presumably meant to appease furious rightsholders and protect their intellectual property.

As a result, power users experienced major whiplash that’s tarnishing the launch’s image even among fans. It’s a lose-lose moment for OpenAI’s flashy new app — either aggravate rightsholders by allowing mass copyright infringement, or turn it into yet another mind-numbing screensaver-generating experience like Meta’s widely mocked Vibes.

“It’s official, Sora 2 is completely boring and useless with these copyright restrictions. Some videos should be considered fair use,” one Reddit user lamented.

Others accused OpenAI of abusing copyright to hype up its new app...

How OpenAI’s eyebrow-raising ask-for-forgiveness-later approach to copyright will play out in the long term remains to be seen. For one, the company may already be in hot water, as major Hollywood studios have already started suing over less."

You Can’t Use Copyrighted Characters in OpenAI’s Sora Anymore and People Are Freaking Out; Gizmodo, October 8, 2025

AJ DELLINGER, Gizmodo; You Can’t Use Copyrighted Characters in OpenAI’s Sora Anymore and People Are Freaking Out

 "OpenAI may be able to appease copyright holders by shifting its Sora policies, but it’s now pissed off its users. As 404 Media pointed out, social channels like Twitter and Reddit are now flooded with Sora users who are angry they can’t make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore. One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was “the only reason this app was so fun.” Another claimed, “Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America’s AI industry.” So, you know, it seems like they’re handling this well."

It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If he’s the future, can we go backwards?; The Guardian, October 10, 2025

 Marina Hyde , The Guardian; It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If he’s the future, can we go backwards?

"I’ve seen it said that OpenAI’s motto should be “better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”, but that cosies it preposterously. Its actual motto seems to be “we’ll do what we want and you’ll let us, bitch”. Consider Altman’s recent political journey. “To anyone familiar with the history of Germany in the 1930s,” Sam warned in 2016, “it’s chilling to watch Trump in action.” He seems to have got over this in time to attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration, presumably because – if we have to extend his artless and predictable analogy – he’s now one of the industrialists welcome in the chancellery to carve up the spoils. “Thank you for being such a pro-business, pro-innovation president,” Sam simpered to Trump at a recent White House dinner for tech titans. “It’s a very refreshing change.” Inevitably, the Trump administration has refused to bring forward any AI regulation at all.

Meanwhile, please remember something Sam and his ironicidal maniacs said earlier this year, when it was suggested that the Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek might have been trained on some of OpenAI’s work. “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more,” his firm’s anguished statement ran. “We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology.” Hilariously, it seemed that the last entity on earth with the power to fight AI theft was OpenAI."

OpenAI wasn’t expecting Sora’s copyright drama; The Verge, October 8, 2025

Hayden Field , The Verge; OpenAI wasn’t expecting Sora’s copyright drama

"When OpenAI released its new AI-generated video app Sora last week, it launched with an opt-out policy for copyright holders — media companies would need to expressly indicate they didn’t want their AI-generated characters running rampant on the app. But after days of Nazi SpongeBob, criminal Pikachu, and Sora-philosophizing Rick and Morty, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company would reverse course and “let rightsholders decide how to proceed.”

In response to a question about why OpenAI changed its policy, Altman said that it came from speaking with stakeholders and suggested he hadn’t expected the outcry.

“I think the theory of what it was going to feel like to people, and then actually seeing the thing, people had different responses,” Altman said. “It felt more different to images than people expected.”

Harvard Professors May Be Eligible for Payments in $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement; The Harvard Crimson, October 1, 2025

Victoria D. Rengel, The Harvard Crimson;  Harvard Professors May Be Eligible for Payments in $1.5 Billion AI Copyright Settlement

"Following mediation, the plaintiffs and defendants filed a motion for the preliminary approval of a settlement on Sept. 5, which included an agreement from Anthropic that it will destroy its pirated databases and pay $1.5 billion in damages to a group of authors and publishers.

On Sept. 25, a California federal judge granted preliminary approval for a settlement, the largest in the history of copyright cases in the U.S.

Each member of the class will receive a payment of approximately $3,000 per pirated work.

Authors whose works are in the databases are not notified separately, but instead must submit their contact information to receive a formal notice of the class action — meaning a number of authors, including many Harvard professors, may be unaware that their works were pirated by Anthropic.

Lynch said Anthropic’s nonconsensual use of her work undermines the purpose behind why she, and other scholars, write and publish their work.

“All of us at Harvard publish, but we thought when we were publishing that we are doing that — to communicate to other human beings,” she said. “Not to be fed into this mill.”"

Disney Sends Cease And Desist Letter To Character.ai For Copyright Infringement As Studios Move To Protect IP; Deadline, September 30, 2025

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline; Disney Sends Cease And Desist Letter To Character.ai For Copyright Infringement As Studios Move To Protect IP

"Walt Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Character.AI, a “personalized superintelligence platform” that the media giant says is ripping off copyrighted characters without authorization.

The AI startup offers users the ability to create customizable, personalized AI companions that can be totally original but in some cases are inspired by existing characters, including, it seems, Disney icons from Spider-Man and Darth Vader to Moana and Elsa.

The letter is the latest legal salvo by Hollywood as studios begin to step up against AI. Disney has also sued AI company Midjourney for allegedly improper use and distribution of AI-generated characters from Disney films. Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal Pictures this month sued Chinese AI firm MiniMax for copyright infringement."

I Sued Anthropic, and the Unthinkable Happened; The New York Times, September 29, 2025

 Andrea Bartz , The New York Times; I Sued Anthropic, and the Unthinkable Happened

"In August 2024, I became one of three named plaintiffs leading a class-action lawsuit against the A.I. company Anthropic for pirating my books and hundreds of thousands of other books to train its A.I. The fight felt daunting, almost preposterous: me — a queer, female thriller writer — versus a company now worth $183 billion?

Thanks to the relentless work of everyone on my legal team, the unthinkable happened: Anthropic agreed to pay authors and publishers $1.5 billion in the largest copyright settlement in history. A federal judge preliminarily approved the agreement last week.

This settlement sends a clear message to the Big Tech companies splashing generative A.I. over every app and page and program: You are not above the law. And it should signal to consumers everywhere that A.I. isn’t an unstoppable tsunami about to overwhelm us. Now is the time for ordinary Americans to recognize our agency and act to put in place the guardrails we want.

The settlement isn’t perfect. It’s absurd that it took an army of lawyers to demonstrate what any 10-year-old knows is true: Thou shalt not steal. At around $3,000 per work, shared by the author and publisher, the damages are far from life-changing (and, some argue, a slap on the wrist for a company flush with cash). I also disagree with the judge’s ruling that, had Anthropic acquired the books legally, training its chatbot on them would have been “fair use.” I write my novels to engage human minds — not to empower an algorithm to mimic my voice and spit out commodity knockoffs to compete directly against my originals in the marketplace, nor to make that algorithm’s creators unfathomably wealthy and powerful.

But as my fellow plaintiff Kirk Wallace Johnson put it, this is “the beginning of a fight on behalf of humans that don’t believe we have to sacrifice everything on the altar of A.I.” Anthropic will destroy its trove of illegally downloaded books; its competitors should take heed to get out of the business of piracy as well. Dozens of A.I. copyright lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, Microsoft and other companies, led in part by Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, David Baldacci, John Grisham, Stacy Schiff and George R. R. Martin. (The New York Times has also brought a suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.)

Though a settlement isn’t legal precedent, Bartz v. Anthropic may serve as a test case for other A.I. lawsuits, the first domino to fall in an industry whose “move fast, break things” modus operandi led to large-scale theft. Among the plaintiffs of other cases are voice actors, visual artists, record labels, YouTubers, media companies and stock-photo libraries, diverse stakeholders who’ve watched Big Tech encroach on their territory with little regard for copyright law...

Now the book publishing industry has sent a message to all A.I. companies: Our intellectual property isn’t yours for the taking, and you cannot act with impunity. This settlement is an opening gambit in a critical battle that will be waged for years to come."

Judge approves $1.5 billion copyright settlement between AI company Anthropic and authors; AP, September 25, 2025

BARBARA ORTUTAY , AP; Judge approves $1.5 billion copyright settlement between AI company Anthropic and authors

" A federal judge on Thursday approved a $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who allege nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train chatbots.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court Thursday after the two sides worked to address his concerns about the settlement, which will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. It does not apply to future works."

Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers; TechCrunch, September 5, 2025

Amanda Silberling , TechCrunch; Screw the money — Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement sucks for writers

"But writers aren’t getting this settlement because their work was fed to an AI — this is just a costly slap on the wrist for Anthropic, a company that just raised another $13 billion, because it illegally downloaded books instead of buying them.

In June, federal judge William Alsup sided with Anthropic and ruled that it is, indeed, legal to train AI on copyrighted material. The judge argues that this use case is “transformative” enough to be protected by the fair use doctrine, a carve-out of copyright law that hasn’t been updated since 1976.

“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” the judge said.

It was the piracy — not the AI training — that moved Judge Alsup to bring the case to trial, but with Anthropic’s settlement, a trial is no longer necessary."