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."
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."
Annelise Levy, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI Hit With Copyright Suit from Writers
"Writers including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou filed a copyright lawsuit accusing six AI giants of using pirated copies of their books to train large language models.
The complaint, filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic PBC,
It is the first copyright lawsuit against xAI over its training process, and the first suit brought by authors against Perplexity...
Carreyrou is among the authors who opted out of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with Anthropic."
CHRIS STOKEL-WALKER, Fast Company ; The Disney-OpenAI tie-up has huge implications for intellectual property
"Walt Disney and OpenAI make for very odd bedfellows: The former is one of the most-recognized brands among children under the age of 18. The near-$200 billion company’s value has been derived from more than a century of aggressive safeguarding of its intellectual property and keeping the magic alive among innocent children.
OpenAI, which celebrated its first decade of existence this week, is best known for upending creativity, the economy, and society with its flagship product, ChatGPT. And in the last two months, it has said it wants to get to a place where its adult users can use its tech to create erotica.
So what the hell should we make of a just-announced deal between the two that will allow ChatGPT and Sora users to create images and videos of more than 200 characters, from Mickey and Minnie Mouse to the Mandalorian, starting from early 2026?"
BRIAN BARRETT, Wired; The Disney-OpenAI Deal Redefines the AI Copyright War
"“I think that AI companies and copyright holders are beginning to understand and become reconciled to the fact that neither side is going to score an absolute victory,” says Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University. While many of these cases are still working their way through the courts, so far it seems like model inputs—the training data that these models learn from—are covered by fair use. But this deal is about outputs—what the model returns based on your prompt—where IP owners like Disney have a much stronger case
Coming to an output agreement resolves a host of messy, potentially unsolvable issues. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at a Wendy’s drive-through, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway—or a user might be able to prompt their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. It’s a tension that legal scholars call the “Snoopy problem,” but in this case you might as well call it the Disney problem.
“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to think about licensing arrangements,” says Sag."
Igor Bonifacic, engadget; Disney's deal with OpenAI is about controlling the future of copyright
"The agreement brings together two parties with very different public stances on copyright. Before OpenAI released Sora, the company reportedly notified studios and talent agencies they would need to opt out of having their work appear in the new app. The company later backtracked on this stance. Before that, OpenAI admitted, in a regulatory filing, it would be "impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials."
By contrast, Disney takes copyright law very seriously. In fact, you could argue no other company has done more to shape US copyright law than Disney. For example, there's the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which is more derisively known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. The law effectively froze the advancement of the public domain in the United States, with Disney being the greatest beneficiary. It was only last year that the company's copyright for Steamboat Willie expired, 95 years after Walt Disney first created the iconic cartoon."
Brooks Barnes, The New York Times; Disney Agrees to Bring Its Characters to OpenAI’s Sora Videos
"In a watershed moment for Hollywood and generative artificial intelligence, Disney on Thursday announced an agreement to bring its characters to Sora, OpenAI’s short-form video platform. Videos made with Sora will be available to stream on Disney+ as part of the three-year deal...
“The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence marks an important moment for our industry, and through this collaboration with OpenAI we will thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling,” Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, said in a statement.
Disney is the first major Hollywood company to cross this particular Rubicon."
Chris Stokel-Walker , NewScientist; AI firms began to feel the legal wrath of copyright holders in 2025
"The three years since the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot, have seen huge changes in every part of our lives. But one area that hasn’t changed – or at least, is still trying to maintain pre-AI norms – is the upholding of copyright law.
It is no secret that leading AI firms built their models by hoovering up data, including copyrighted material, from the internet without asking for permission first. This year, major copyright holders struck back, buffeting AI companies were with a range of lawsuits alleging copyright infringement."
Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, The New York Times ; A.I. Videos Have Flooded Social Media. No One Was Ready.
Apps like OpenAI’s Sora are fooling millions of users into thinking A.I. videos are real, even when they include warning labels.
"Videos like the fake interview above, created with OpenAI’s new app, Sora, show how easily public perceptions can be manipulated by tools that can produce an alternate reality with a series of simple prompts.
In the two months since Sora arrived, deceptive videos have surged on TikTok, X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to experts who track them. The deluge has raised alarm over a new generation of disinformation and fakes.
Most of the major social media companies have policies that require disclosure of artificial intelligence use and broadly prohibit content intended to deceive. But those guardrails have proved woefully inadequate for the kind of technological leaps OpenAI’s tools represent."
Blake Brittain, Reuters ; OpenAI loses fight to keep ChatGPT logs secret in copyright case
"OpenAI must produce millions of anonymized chat logs from ChatGPT users in its high-stakes copyright dispute with the New York Times and other news outlets, a federal judge in Manhattan ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Ona Wang in a decision made public on Wednesday said that the 20 million logs were relevant to the outlets' claims and that handing them over would not risk violating users' privacy."
"
That hasn’t worked so far as a winning legal strategy that can be used by other chatbot makers anticipating similar discovery demands in exploding chatbot-related litigation.
Instead, it threatens to turn attention to just how much information chatbots like ChatGPT are collecting and retaining about their users."
OpenAI has largely promoted ChatGPT as a productivity tool, and in many conversations users asked for help with practical tasks such as retrieving information. But in more than 1 in 10 of the chats The Post analyzed, people engaged the chatbot in abstract discussions, musing on topics like their ideas for breakthrough medical treatments or personal beliefs about the nature of reality.
Data released by OpenAI in September from an internal study of queries sent to ChatGPT showed that most are for personal use, not work. (The Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)...
Emotional conversations were also common in the conversations analyzed by The Post, and users often shared highly personal details about their lives. In some chats, the AI tool could be seen adapting to match a user’s viewpoint, creating a kind of personalized echo chamber in which ChatGPT endorsed falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Lee Rainie, director of the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University, said his research has suggested ChatGPT’s design encourages people to form emotional attachments with the chatbot. “The optimization and incentives towards intimacy are very clear,” he said. “ChatGPT is trained to further or deepen the relationship.”"
MATILDA BATTERSBY , The Bookseller; OpenAI copyright case reveals 'ease with which generative AI can devastate the market', says PA
"A judge’s ruling that legal action by authors against OpenAI for copyright infringement can go ahead reveals “the ease with which generative AI can devastate the market”, according to the Publishers Association (PA).
Last week, a federal judge in the US refused OpenAI’s attempts to dismiss claims by authors that text summaries of published works by ChatGPT (which is owned by OpenAI) infringes their copyrights.
The lawsuit, which is being heard in New York, brings together cases from a number of authors, as well as the Authors Guild, filed in various courts.
In his ruling, which upheld the authors’ right to attempt to sue OpenAI, District Judge Sidney Stein compared George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones to summaries of the novel created by ChatGPT.
Judge Stein said: “[A] discerning observer could easily conclude that this detailed summary is substantially similar to Martin’s original work because the summary conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes of the original.”
The class action consolidates 12 complaints being brought against OpenAI and Microsoft. It argues copyrighted books were reproduced to train OpenAI’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLM) and, crucially, that LLMs, including ChatGPT, can infringe copyright via their output, ie the text produced when asked a question.
This landmark legal case is the first to examine whether the output of an AI chatbot infringes copyright, rather than looking at whether the training of the model was an infringement."
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"."
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."
Amandeep Jutla , The Guardian; AI psychosis is a growing danger. ChatGPT is moving in the wrong direction
[Kip Currier: Note this announcement that OpenAI's Sam Altman made on October 14. It's billionaire CEO-speak for "acceptable risk", i.e. "The level of potential losses a society or community considers acceptable given existing social, economic, political, cultural, technical, and environmental conditions." https://inee.org/eie-glossary/acceptable-risk
Translation: Altman's conflict of interest-riven assessment that AI's benefits outweigh a corpus of evidence establishing increasingly documented risks and harms of AI to the mental health of young children, teens, and adults.]
[Excerpt]
"On 14 October 2025, the CEO of OpenAI made an extraordinary announcement.
“We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive,” it says, “to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues.”
As a psychiatrist who studies emerging psychosis in adolescents and young adults, this was news to me.
Researchers have identified 16 cases in the media this year of individuals developing symptoms of psychosis – losing touch with reality – in the context of ChatGPT use. My group has since identified four more. In addition to these is the now well-known case of a 16-year-old who died by suicide after discussing his plans extensively with ChatGPT – which encouraged them. If this is Sam Altman’s idea of “being careful with mental health issues”, that’s not good enough.
The plan, according to his announcement, is to be less careful soon. “We realize,” he continues, that ChatGPT’s restrictions “made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases.”
“Mental health problems”, if we accept this framing, are independent of ChatGPT. They belong to users, who either have them or don’t. Fortunately, these problems have now been “mitigated”, though we are not told how (by “new tools” Altman presumably means the semi-functional and easily circumvented parental controls that OpenAI recently introduced)."
, The New York Times ; Big Tech Makes Cal State Its A.I. Training Ground
