Emma Jacobs, Wailin Wong, Julia Ritchey, Kate Concannon, NPR; Can you copyright artwork made using AI?
"Copyright is the legal system used to reward and protect creations made by humans. But with growing adoption of artificial intelligence, does copyright extend to artwork that’s made using AI? Today on the show, how a test case over a Vincent Van Gogh mashup is testing the boundaries of copyright law."
Gordon Feinblatt LLC, Lexology; New Ruling Makes Old Postings a New Copyright Problem
"Go through your website and delete any old photos and music you do not own or have a license to use. Every company and internet user should be diligent and not post any images, music, or other content unless they are certain they have the rights to do so. Lesson number one is: do not merely pluck material from the internet and use it for yourself.
Lesson number two is that copyright owners can now look back more than three years and obtain damages for a long history of infringement. Last year the Supreme Court ruled that copyright damages can reach back to the beginning of the infringing usage so long as a copyright infringement case is properly brought. This means that historical usage of infringing works can rack up many years of damages."
BARRY SCANNELL, Financial Times; Who owns the copyright for AI work?
"Generative artificial intelligence poses two copyright puzzles. The first is the widely discussed question of compensation for work used to train AI models. The second, which has yet to receive as much attention, concerns the work that AI produces. Copyright is granted to authors. So what happens to work that has no human author?"
Adam Pitch, The Register ; Suetopia: Generative AI is a lawsuit waiting to happen to your business
"More and more US companies are using generative AI as a way to save money they might otherwise pay creative professionals. But they're not thinking about the legal bills.
You could be asking an AI to create public-facing communications for your company, such as a logo, promotional copy, or an entire website. If those materials happen to look like copyrighted works, you may be hearing from a lawyer.
"It's pretty clear that if you create something that's substantially similar to a copyrighted work that an infringement has occurred, unless it's for a fair use purpose," said Kit Walsh, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Director of AI and Access-to-Knowledge Legal Projects."
JOE WILKINS , Futurism; Using AI for Work Could Land You on the Receiving End of a Nasty Lawsuit
"For all its hype, artificial intelligence isn't without its psychological, environmental, and even spiritual hazards.
Perhaps the most pressing concern on an individual level, though, is that it puts users on the hook for a nearly infinite number of legal hazards — even at work, as it turns out.
A recent breakdown by The Register highlights the legal dangers of AI use, especially in corporate settings. If you use generative AI software to spit out graphics, press releases, logos, or videos, you and your employer could end up facing six-figure damages, the publication warns.
This is thanks to the vast archive of copyrighted data that virtually all commercial generative AI models are trained on.
The Register uses Nintendo's Mario as a prime example of how one might stumble, intentionally or not, into a massive copyright lawsuit, regardless of intent to infringe: if you use AI to generate a cutesy mascot for your plumbing company that looks too much like the iconic videogame character, you could easily find yourself in the legal crosshairs of the notoriously litigious corporation.
"The real harm comes from the attorney's fees that you can get saddled with," intellectual property lawyer Benjamin Bedrava told the publication. "Because you could have a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in attorney's fees over something where the license would have been fifteen hundred dollars.""
Adrian Humphreys, National Post; Canadian father and son named as major 'copyright pirates' jailed 5 years unless they give up their secrets
"Two Ontario men accused of being the scofflaw pirates behind years of large-scale digital streaming of copyrighted movies and TV have been sentenced to five years in prison — not for piracy, but for contempt of court — unless they reveal passwords and accounts.
TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Victory! Ninth Circuit Limits Intrusive DMCA Subpoenas
"Fortunately, Section 512(h) has an important limitation that protects users. Over two decades ago, several federal appeals courts ruled that Section 512(h) subpoenas cannot be issued to ISPs. Now, in In re Internet Subscribers of Cox Communications, LLC, the Ninth Circuit agreed, as EFF urged it to in our amicus brief."
MYLES WERNTZ, Christianity Today; CHATBOT CHEATING IN ETHICS CLASS
"The ethical and practical problems are legion: copyright disputes, ecological effects, a possible economic bubble, and plain deceit. Still, for an undergraduate on a deadline, the appeal is obvious."
Paulo Carvão , Forbes; Copyright Is Dead. But Is It?
"This is a clash between two visions of the future. One embraces a world where technology moves faster than the law, forcing us to abandon old notions of ownership in favor of new, more resilient business models. The other sees a future where copyright is not an outdated legal concept but a vital economic engine that can be adapted and monetized in the age of AI. The middle ground points us to a path forward that adapts current laws to fit AI’s real-world usage.
The future of copyright is unlikely to be a simple binary decision. Instead, it will be a negotiation between creators, tech companies, lawyers, and regulators. What’s clear is that the conversation is no longer confined to legal journals but has entered the mainstream, sparking a necessary dialogue about the value of creativity, the nature of intelligence, and the future of the digital economy."
, NiemanLab; Japan’s largest newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun, sues AI startup Perplexity for copyright violations
"The Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan’s largest newspaper by circulation, has sued the generative AI startup Perplexity for copyright infringement. The lawsuit, filed in Tokyo District Court on August 7, marks the first copyright challenge by a major Japanese news publisher against an AI company.
The filing claims that Perplexity accessed 119,467 articles on Yomiuri’s site between February and June of this year, based on an analysis of its company server logs. Yomiuri alleges the scraping has been used by Perplexity to reproduce the newspaper’s copyrighted articles in responses to user queries without authorization.
In particular, the suit claims Perplexity has violated its “right of reproduction” and its “right to transmit to the public,” two tenets of Japanese law that give copyright holders control over the copying and distribution of their work. The suit seeks nearly $15 million in damages and demands that Perplexity stop reproducing its articles...
Japan’s copyright law allows AI developers to train models on copyrighted material without permission. This leeway is a direct result of a 2018 amendment to Japan’s Copyright Act, meant to encourage AI developmentin the country’s tech sector. The law does not, however, allow for wholesale reproduction of those works, or for AI developers to distribute copies in a way that will “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; Judge rejects Anthropic bid to appeal copyright ruling, postpone trial
"A federal judge in California has denied a request from Anthropic to immediately appeal a ruling that could place the artificial intelligence company on the hook for billions of dollars in damages for allegedly pirating authors' copyrighted books.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup said on Monday that Anthropic must wait until after a scheduled December jury trial to appeal his decision that the company is not shielded from liability for pirating millions of books to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude."
PATRICK VARINE , Trib Live; 97 years ago today, Disney copyrighted the Mickey Mouse character
"On Aug. 12, 1928, an ambitious young man named Walt Disney filed a copyright application for Mickey Mouse, a new animated character he’d created alongside animator Ub Iwerks.
That turned out to be a successful business move for Disney, who would go on to build his character into an international entertainment empire."
Ariel Zilber, New York Post ; News Corp CEO Robert Thomson slams AI firms for stealing copyrighted material like Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’
"The media executive said the voracious appetite of the AI firms to train their bots on proprietary content without paying for it risks eroding America’s edge over rival nations.
“Much is made of the competition with China, but America’s advantage is ingenuity and creativity, not bits and bytes, not watts but wit,” he said.
“To undermine that comparative advantage by stripping away IP rights is to vandalize our virtuosity.”"
Michael S. Levine, Geoffrey B. Fehling, Armin Ghiam, Madalyn "Mady" Moore of Hunton Andrews Kurth - Publications, The National Law Review; Insuring Intellectual Property – Examining AI and Fair Use
"The frequency of lawsuits involving the development and deployment of AI technologies is increasing by the day. Recent lawsuits seeking to hold companies directly and secondarily liable for “joint enterprises” based on use (or alleged misuse) of copyrighted works for training AI models serve as important reminders about the protections that intellectual property (IP) insurance can offer to cover the risks associated with copyright infringement claims.
Recently, a California federal district court ruled that it was “fair use” for an AI software company to use copyrighted books to train its large language models (LLMs). However, the court also found the company’s unauthorized possession of over seven million pirated books that it downloaded from the internet (apparently for free) amounted to copyright infringement independent from whether the books were ultimately used to train the LLMs. In contrast, where the company purchased books before scanning them into digital files, the use was a permissible “fair use.”
The court’s order in Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:24-cv-05417 (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025), highlights the nuanced permissible use of copyrighted training data and underscores why policyholders engaged in the use of copyrighted material should acquire and maintain robust IP insurance that will reliably respond to claims of alleged infringement."
BEATRICE NOLAN , Fortune; A copyright lawsuit over pirated books could result in ‘business-ending’ damages for Anthropic
"A class-action lawsuit against Anthropic could expose the AI company to billions in copyright damages over its alleged use of pirated books from shadow libraries like LibGen and PiLiMi to train its models. While a federal judge ruled that training on lawfully obtained books may qualify as fair use, the court will hold a separate trial to address the allegedly illegal acquisition and storage of copyrighted works. Legal experts warn that statutory damages could be severe, with estimates ranging from $1 billion to over $100 billion."
Tim Hrenchir , Topeka Capital-Journal; Storm chaser Reed Timmer sues Kansas company for using his tornado video
"Celebrity storm chaser Reed Timmer has sued a Kansas roofing and construction company alleging it committed copyright infringement by using video on Instagram that he took during a 2022 tornado at Andover, Kansas."
Chris Middleton , PetaPixel; AI and copyright – the state of play, post the US AI Action Plan
[Kip Currier: This article effectively skewers the ridiculousness and hypocrisy of the assertion of Trump and the wealthiest corporations on the planet that licensing content to fuel AI LLMs is impossible and too onerous. AI companies would never let users make use of their IP without compensation and permission. Yet, these same companies -- and now Trump via his AI Action Plan -- argue that respecting the copyrights of content holders just isn't "doable".]
[Excerpt]
"The top six most valuable companies on Earth – in history, in fact – are all in AI and tech. Between them, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta already have a market capitalization of $12.9 trillion, roughly equivalent to the value of China's entire economy in 2017-18; or three times the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the third largest economy today, Germany, and half that of the US.
Spend trillions of dollars on planet-heating, water-guzzling AI data centers to run the likes of OpenAI's frontier models – systems that (in Trump's view) will be powered by coal? No problem. But license some books when you can scrape millions from known pirate sources? Impossible, it seems.
Whether US courts will agree with that absurd position is unknown."
Ed Nawotka , Publishers Weekly; Trump’s Comments Undermine AI Action Plan, Threaten Copyright
"Senate bill proposes 'opt-in' legislation
Trump's comments come on the heels of the introduction, by U.S. senators Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), of the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act this past Monday following a hearing last week on AI companies' copyright infringement. The bipartisan legislation aims to hold AI firms liable for using copyrighted works or personal data without acquiring explicit consent to train AI models. It would empower individuals—including writers, artists, and content creators—to sue companies in federal court if their data or copyrighted works are used without consent. It also supports class action lawsuits and advocates for violators to pay robust penalties.
"AI companies are robbing the American people blind while leaving artists, writers, and other creators with zero recourse," said Hawley. "It’s time for Congress to give the American worker their day in court to protect their personal data and creative works. My bipartisan legislation would finally empower working Americans who now find their livelihoods in the crosshairs of Big Tech’s lawlessness."
"This bill embodies a bipartisan consensus that AI safeguards are urgent—because the technology is moving at accelerating speed, and so are dangers to privacy," added Blumenthal. "Enforceable rules can put consumers back in control of their data, and help bar abuses. Tech companies must be held accountable—and liable legally—when they breach consumer privacy, collecting, monetizing or sharing personal information without express consent. Consumers must be given rights and remedies—and legal tools to make them real—not relying on government enforcement alone."
Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; Donald Trump Is Fairy-Godmothering AI
"In a sense, the action plan is a bet. AI is already changing a number of industries, including software engineering, and a number of scientific disciplines. Should AI end up producing incredible prosperity and new scientific discoveries, then the AI Action Plan may well get America there faster simply by removing any roadblocks and regulations, however sensible, that would slow the companies down. But should the technology prove to be a bubble—AI products remain error-prone, extremely expensive to build, and unproven in many business applications—the Trump administration is more rapidly pushing us toward the bust. Either way, the nation is in Silicon Valley’s hands...
Once the red tape is gone, the Trump administration wants to create a “dynamic, ‘try-first’ culture for AI across American industry.” In other words, build and test out AI products first, and then determine if those products are actually helpful—or if they pose any risks.
Trump gestured toward other concessions to the AI industry in his speech. He specifically targeted intellectual-property laws, arguing that training AI models on copyrighted books and articles does not infringe upon copyright because the chatbots, like people, are simply learning from the content. This has been a major conflict in recent years, with more than 40 related lawsuits filed against AI companies since 2022. (The Atlantic is suing the AI company Cohere, for example.) If courts were to decide that training AI models with copyrighted material is against the law, it would be a major setback for AI companies. In their official recommendations for the AI Action Plan, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google all requested a copyright exception, known as “fair use,” for AI training. Based on his statements, Trump appears to strongly agree with this position, although the AI Action Plan itself does not reference copyright and AI training.
Also sprinkled throughout the AI Action Plan are gestures toward some MAGA priorities. Notably, the policy states that the government will contract with only AI companies whose models are “free from top-down ideological bias”—a reference to Sacks’s crusade against “woke” AI—and that a federal AI-risk-management framework should “eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” Trump signed a third executive order today that, in his words, will eliminate “woke, Marxist lunacy” from AI models...
Looming over the White House’s AI agenda is the threat of Chinese technology getting ahead. The AI Action Plan repeatedly references the importance of staying ahead of Chinese AI firms, as did the president’s speech: “We will not allow any foreign nation to beat us; our nation will not live in a planet controlled by the algorithms of the adversaries,” Trump declared...
But whatever happens on the international stage, hundreds of millions of Americans will feel more and more of generative AI’s influence—on salaries and schools, air quality and electricity costs, federal services and doctor’s offices. AI companies have been granted a good chunk of their wish list; if anything, the industry is being told that it’s not moving fast enough. Silicon Valley has been given permission to accelerate, and we’re all along for the ride."
Ted Johnson, Tom Tapp, Deadline; Donald Trump Says AI Companies Can’t Be Expected To Pay For All Copyrighted Content Used In Their Training Models: “Not Do-Able”
[Kip Currier: Don't be fooled by the flimflam rhetoric in Trump's AI Action Plan unveiled yesterday (July 23, 2025). Where Trump's AI Action Plan says “We must ensure that free speech flourishes in the era of AI and that AI procured by the Federal government objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas", it's actually the exact opposite: the Trump plan is censorious and will "cancel out" truth (e.g. on climate science, misinformation and disinformation, etc.) in Orwellian fashion.]
[Excerpt]
"The plan is a contrast to Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, who focused on the government’s role in ensuring that the technology was safe.
The Trump White House plan also recommends updating federal procurement guidelines “to ensure that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias.” Also recommended is revising the National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework to remove references to misinformation, DEI and climate change.
“We must ensure that free speech flourishes in the era of AI and that AI procured by the Federal government objectively reflects truth rather than social engineering agendas,” the plan says."
