Crumbl is sued for $24M over music copyright violations; Restaurant Business, April 28, 2025

Jonathan Maze, Restaurant Business; Crumbl is sued for $24M over music copyright violations

"The music group is asking a court to award it as much as $150,000 for each work used without permission, or nearly $24 million...

Crumbl, which operates more than 1,000 locations and is looking for a buyer, has used social media aggressively since its emergence in 2017. Those videos have played a key role in the chain’s growth and ongoing popularity. The company has 9.8 million followers on TikTok and 6.1 million on Instagram...

Warner in its complaint also referred to Crumbl’s own history of pushing back against copyright infringement. It cited the company’s since-settled lawsuit against the cookie chain Dirty Dough, and Crumbl over the years has aggressively gone after upstart companies that it said mimicked its business."

Sydney woman who sold a cartoon cat T-shirt told to pay US$100,000 in Grumpy Cat copyright case; The Guardian, April 25, 2025

Josh Taylor, The Guardian; Sydney woman who sold a cartoon cat T-shirt told to pay US$100,000 in Grumpy Cat copyright case

"Others across the globe have found themselves in similar situations. There are posts on Reddit asking what to do after finding a default judgment has been made against them.

“I had no idea ‘Grumpy Cat’ was a thing. ‘Grumpy Cat’ was not even mentioned on my design neither looked my design like their stupid cat,” one poster said.

Prof Graeme Austin, chair in private law at Victoria University in New Zealand, said US trademark law gives courts powers to impose tough damages awards in infringement cases, including statutory damages of up to US$200,000.

“Wholesale default judgment proceedings in trademark and copyright cases are a familiar strategy for intellectual property owners,” he said."

AI and the visual arts: The case for copyright protection; Brookings, April 18, 2025

Judy Wang and  Nicol Turner Lee , Brookings; AI and the visual arts: The case for copyright protection

"Looking ahead  

As AI-generated art continues to reshape the creative landscape, the legal and economic challenges surrounding copyright, authorship, and enforcement will only grow more complex. Ongoing lawsuits, reactions from artists, and market shifts highlight the struggle to define human authorship and protect artists’ rights in an era where AI-generated works hold significant commercial value, but lack clear copyright protections. With increasing pressure on legislative and regulatory bodies to address these issues, the future of AI-generated art will depend on policies that balance innovation with fair compensation and safeguards for human creativity.  

While we await the final part of the Copyright Office’s report, which will determine the legal implications of training AI on copyrighted data, the more pressing determinant of fair use in GenAI training may come from the courts. Yet, regardless of the outcome, the Copyright Office should transcend its passive regulatory guidance and actively develop new mechanisms to distinguish human-authored elements from AI-generated ones to enforce its present guidance. In addition, the office must think creatively about flexible frameworks that can account for future, more nuanced and complex modes of collaboration between human and GenAI systems. This may require stronger disclosure requirements, improved detection methods, and a reexamination of what constitutes meaningful human authorship in an increasing AI-involved creative process.   

Further, artists, tech companies, and policymakers must be brought to the table to ensure copyright law reflects the newest collaborations in AI and art, protects human creativity, and accommodates technological progress. Without safeguards, the rapid influx of AI into the art market could lead to a systemic devaluation of human original authorship and growing precarity in the creative field. The future of AI-generated art hinges on such governance. "

This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”; Vanity Fair, April 15, 2025

KEZIAH WEIR, Vanity Fair; This Is How Meta AI Staffers Deemed More Than 7 Million Books to Have No “Economic Value”

"Last month, I prompted Meta AI with a question: “Is it okay to use pirated books to train AI?” The machine’s response was unequivocal. “Using pirated books to train AI is not okay,” it admonished. “In fact, it’s a serious violation of copyright laws and can have significant consequences for authors and publishers. Recently, it’s been reported that Meta used millions of pirated books to develop its AI programs, which has sparked widespread outrage and condemnation from the writing community.”"

Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'; Entrepreneur, April 14, 2025

SHERIN SHIBU EDITED BY MELISSA MALAMUT  , Entrepreneur; Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'

"While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.

AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed "hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet" to become operational."

From the courtroom to the notepad: Ian Crosby advocates for fair use; The Daily Mississippian, April 16, 2025

Cameron Larkin , The Daily Mississippian; From the courtroom to the notepad: Ian Crosby advocates for fair use

"How can journalism and artificial intelligence coexist? What are the practical uses of AI in a field like journalism? What does the legal side of all of this look like?

Lead counsel for the New York Times v. OpenAI copyright lawsuit, Ian Crosby, answered these questions and many more at the “Addressing the Impact of Social Media and Artificial Intelligence on Democracy” symposium hosted April 1-2 by the University of Mississippi’s brand-new Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation...

Knowing this, Crosby said that AI does not have to be viewed as the enemy many people make it out to be; rather, when used and operated in the right way, AI can be a tool for journalists.

“Just to be clear, I don’t think that any of my clients feel that AI is bad (or) that AI shouldn’t exist,” Crosby said. “AI has amazing uses, and those uses should persist.”

One practical use Crosby suggested for AI in journalism is for the “needle in the haystack problem.” Crosby said that AI is useful for delving into large data sets, such as government documents, to quickly sift through and pick out key information much quicker than a human could."

How to Find Copyright Owners For Covers and Samples; HypeBot, April 16, 2025

Alana Bonilla , HypeBot; How to Find Copyright Owners For Covers and Samples

"Want to use a someone else’s audio legally but don’t know who owns it? This expert guide shows you how to find copyright holders fast – and get the permissions you need without the legal headaches."

Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column); The Hollywood Reporter, April 16, 2025

Ed Newton-Rex ; Creators Are Losing the AI Copyright Battle. We Have to Keep Fighting (Guest Column)

"The struggle between AI companies and creatives around “training data” — or what you and I would refer to as people’s life’s work — may be the defining struggle of this generation for the media industries. AI companies want to exploit creators’ work without paying them, using it to train AI models that compete with those creators; creators and rights holders are doing everything they can to stop them."

The real argument artists should be making against AI; Vox, April 16, 2025

 Sigal Samuel, Vox; The real argument artists should be making against AI

[Paywall to access]

Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’; The Washington Post, April 15, 2025

Analysis by Gerrit De Vynck

 and 

Will Oremus

with research by 

Andrea Jiménez

 , The Washington Post; Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’

"Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, posted a cryptic and drastic demand on Elon Musk’s X over the weekend: “delete all IP law.” The post drew a quick reply from Mr. X himself: “I agree.”

Musk’s laconic response amplified Dorsey’s post to his 220 million followers and sparked a debate that drew in a cast of characters including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, tech lawyer and former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, novelist Walter Kirn, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and the technologist and early Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, a.k.a. Rabble, among others...

Serious policy idea or not, the concord between Dorsey and Musk highlights how the debate over AI and copyright law is coming to a head in Silicon Valley.

How it’s resolved will have major ramifications for the tech companies, creative people and their livelihoods and the overall AI race."

Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case; TechCrunch, April 11, 2025

Kyle Wiggers , TechCrunch; Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case

"A group of professors specializing in copyright law has filed an amicus brief in support of authors suing Meta for allegedly training its Llama AI models on e-books without permission.

The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense “a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.”"

Entrance to [Copyright] Paradise Halted by the Human-Authorship Requirement; The National Law Review, April 9, 2025

Jonathan D. Reichman of Hunton Andrews Kurth   - Publications , The National Law Review; Entrance to [Copyright] Paradise Halted by the Human-Authorship Requirement

"In mid-March, a federal appeals court affirmed a ruling finding that artwork created solely by an artificial intelligence (AI) system is not entitled to copyright protection. Thaler v. Perlmutter, No. 23-5233 (D.C. Cir. Mar. 18, 2025). This decision aligns with the position taken by the US Copyright Office in its recent report in light of the ongoing evolution, application, and litigation surrounding AI systems. U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability (2025).

While this decision may appear straightforward, future developments could arise through an application to the US Supreme Court or through cases addressing the extent of human involvement necessary in AI-generated works that seek copyright protection.

Key Takeaways

• The Copyright Act of 1976 (Act) requires all eligible works to be authored by a human being.
• The Act’s definition of “author” does not apply to machines.
• The work-made-for-hire doctrine requires an existing copyright interest.
• Thaler’s representation that the work was generated autonomously by a computer system weighed heavily against his challenges to the human-authorship requirement and the work-made-for-hire doctrine.
• The Court rejected Dr. Thaler’s arguments that (1) the term “author” is not confined to human beings; (2) the work was made for hire; and (3) the human-authorship requirement prevents protection of works made with AI.
• The Court affirmed the denial of copyright registration where the author of the work was listed as a machine."

A banana taped to a wall? This artist says he did it first. The Supreme Court ignored him.; USA TODAY, April 7, 2025

Maureen Groppe , USA TODAY; A banana taped to a wall? This artist says he did it first. The Supreme Court ignored him.

"California artist Joe Morford tried, hoping the Supreme Court would give him credit for being the first person to tape a banana to the wall in the name of art. But the justices on Monday rejected his fruit suit. 

That leaves in place lower court rulings that Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who sold his banana art work, “Comedian,” for about $6.2 million last year, did not rip the idea off of Morford."

Judge calls out OpenAI’s “straw man” argument in New York Times copyright suit; Ars Technica, April 4, 2025

ASHLEY BELANGER , Ars Technica; 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.'""

EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), March 31, 2025

 CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); EFF Urges Third Circuit to Join the Legal Chorus: No One Owns the Law

"This case concerns UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes—like the National Electrical Code—that includes codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law, and therefore has the right to control how the public accesses and shares them. Fortunately, neither the Constitution nor the Copyright Act support that theory. Faced with similar claims, some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have held that the codes lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that, whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, making them fully accessible and usable online is a lawful fair use. A federal court in Pennsylvania followed the latter path in this case, finding that UpCodes’ database was a protected fair use."

L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66; The New York Times, March 26, 2025

 Jeré Longman, The New York Times; L.J. Smith, Author of ‘Vampire Diaries’ Book Series, Dies at 66

"L.J. Smith, an author of young adult novels best known for “The Vampire Diaries” series, which became a hit television drama, and for repossessing her characters by writing fan fiction after she was fired and replaced by a ghostwriter, died on March 8 in Walnut Creek, Calif. She was 66...

Alloy Entertainment sought a young adult version of supernatural romance and signed Ms. Smith to write “The Vampire Diaries,” a series centered on a love triangle involving a popular high school girl named Elena Gilbert and a pair of vampire brothers, Stefan and Damon Salvatore.

The first three books, written for HarperCollins, were published in 1991, and a fourth was released in 1992. But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters...

By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

In 2009, “The Vampire Diaries” were adapted into a dramatic television series that lasted for eight seasons on the CW Network. Popular among younger audiences, the show used various musical genres to explore topics like romance and morality and helped popularize a grunge and leather-jacket fashion look."

ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines; Axios, March 28, 2025

Ina Fried, Axios; ChatGPT's new image generator blurs copyright lines

"AI image generators aren't new, but the one OpenAI handed to ChatGPT's legions of users this week is more powerful and has fewer guardrails than its predecessors — opening up a range of uses that are both tantalizing and terrifying."

• 
  

Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward; NPR, March 27, 2025

Bobby Allyn, NPR ; Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward

"A federal judge on Wednesday rejected OpenAI's request to toss out a copyright lawsuit from The New York Times that alleges that the tech company exploited the newspaper's content without permission or payment.

In an order allowing the lawsuit to go forward, Judge Sidney Stein, of the Southern District of New York, narrowed the scope of the lawsuit but allowed the case's main copyright infringement claims to go forward.

Stein did not immediately release an opinion but promised one would come "expeditiously."

The decision is a victory for the newspaper, which has joined forces with other publishers, including The New York Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting, to challenge the way that OpenAI collected vast amounts of data from the web to train its popular artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT."

Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright; The Guardian, March 25, 2025

Ella Creamer , The Guardian; Richard Osman urges writers to ‘have a good go’ at Meta over breaches of copyright

"Richard Osman has said that writers will “have a good go” at taking on Meta after it emerged that the company used a notorious database believed to contain pirated books to train artificial intelligence.

“Copyright law is not complicated at all,” the author of The Thursday Murder Club series wrote in a statement on X on Sunday evening. “If you want to use an author’s work you need to ask for permission. If you use it without permission you’re breaking the law. It’s so simple.”

In January, it emerged that Mark Zuckerberg approved his company’s use of The Library Genesis dataset, a “shadow library” that originated in Russia and contains more than 7.5m books. In 2024 a New York federal court ordered LibGen’s anonymous operators to pay a group of publishers $30m (£24m) in damages for copyright infringement. Last week, the Atlantic republished a searchable database of the titles contained in LibGen. In response, authors and writers’ organisations have rallied against Meta’s use of copyrighted works."

Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case; Reuters, March 26, 2025

Blake Brittain , Reuters; Anthropic wins early round in music publishers' AI copyright case

"Artificial intelligence company Anthropic convinced a California federal judge on Tuesday to reject a preliminary bid to block it from using lyrics owned by Universal Music Group and other music publishers to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

U.S. District Judge Eumi Lee said that the publishers' request was too broad and that they failed to show Anthropic's conduct caused them "irreparable harm."