Friday’s Endnotes – 10/10/25

By , October 10, 2025.

Machines ‘Copy,’ Humans ‘Learn’ — from Sandra Aistars: “I’ve noticed that AI models are bad at understanding context — and therefore in drawing the right conclusions — in both art and law. My theory is that this is because, unlike artists and lawyers who study the underlying narrative and logic of a work case by case, AI models mechanically copy undifferentiated data and then repeat the statistically most probable lines. They do not engage the original work or the artist on their terms.”

Mass Resignations Call into Question Legitimacy of ALI Copyright Restatement — “From the beginning, many copyright experts, professors, and lawmakers questioned the rationale behind attempting to ‘restate’ an area of law governed by a federal statute, and they warned that the Copyright Restatement was more likely to look like a restatement of the Reporters’ views on copyright rather than a restatement of actual copyright law.”

Internet Archive Ordered to Block Books in Belgium After Talks With Publishers Fail — “After initially avoiding external blocking measures, the Internet Archive must block access to various books in its Open Library project under the orders of a Belgian government department. While the final decision avoids a full site blockade, it forces the U.S. non-profit to implement country-specific censorship or face a €500,000 penalty, raising questions about the use of anti-piracy frameworks to settle complex copyright disputes.”

Motion Picture Association Blasts OpenAI Over Sora 2 Video Copyright Opt-Outs — “Sora 2 was introduced with the idea that creators could opt out if they object to having their characters or copyrighted work used on the site. Under copyright law, rightsholders can sue and obtain statutory damages for individual acts of infringement — regardless of whether the infringer offers an opt-out or not.”

Legal battle over China-based ‘ultra-fast-fashion’ will go forward for now — “Temu’s entry into the market brought a quick reaction from Shein—but according to the complaint, not a lawful one. Indeed, threatened by Temu’s rise, Temu claims, Shein ‘hatched a desperate plan’ to disrupt Temu’s operations and slow its growth in the United States. That scheme, Temu claims, runs the gamut from abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, copying Temu’s intellectual property, stealing its confidential information, and tying up Chinese suppliers through exclusive-dealing agreements and intimidation, to filing dubious infringement lawsuits and defrauding the U.S. Copyright Office.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 10/03/25

By , October 03, 2025.

In the fight over AI, copyright is America’s competitive weapon — “China’s leading model, DeepSeek, was reportedly trained in part on stolen intellectual property from U.S. models and creators. If the U.S. abandons its own standards, we don’t ‘catch up’ to China; we simply validate a global race to the bottom in which American creative capital becomes free raw material for anyone to scrape. In contrast, a rights-cleared AI stack would give American firms something uniquely exportable: legal certainty, ethical legitimacy, and a system in which creators actively want to participate.”

OpenAI on losing track in German copyright case brought by music rights collecting society over song lyrics; injunction looms large — “The presiding judge left no doubt in her introductory outline of the issues in the case that the panel deems OpenAI liable for copyright infringement. She noted that the facts (which OpenAI addressed in apparently voluminous pleadings) were actually ‘not complicated’ given that OpenAI does not dispute the use of the copyrighted works at issue in the training of its ChatGPT model. The judges are furthermore unpersuaded that users, not OpenAI, bear the responsibility for ChatGPT’s outputs.”

Top Noteworthy Copyright Stories from September 2025  — “In September, the most significant copyright news was the landmark settlement in a major AI copyright case, and the filing of several new copyright infringement cases against AI companies. Here is a quick snapshot of other top copyright news stories from September 2025.”

Unlocking Infringement? Post University Lawsuit Targets Course Hero’s Business Practices — “At its core, Post University v. Course Hero (Learneo, Inc.) is a copyright and trademark infringement case involving a private university suing a major online educational platform—an unusual plaintiff in a space typically dominated by textbook publishers or media companies. For Post, the stakes involve control over its pedagogical content, institutional reputation, and accreditation integrity; for Course Hero, the case strikes at the heart of its user-generated content model and DMCA safe harbor reliance. Course Hero moved for summary judgment on Post’s claims. The Court denied Course Hero’s motion on the core intellectual property claims brought on Post.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 09/26/25

By , September 26, 2025.

Transatlantic Comments on the Anthropic AI Settlement — “Judge Alsup’s preliminary approval at the US District Court of the Northern District of California sees Anthropic paying US$1.5 billion to authors and publishers of close to half-a-million books that Anthropic downloaded from notorious pirate sites to feed its AI models. The San Francisco-based Anthropic is valued at $183 billion—a figure five times larger than the aggregate revenue of the American publishing market in 2024.”

Five Copyright Office Resources You May Not Know Exist — “The U.S. Copyright Office provides a wide range of resources to support creators, educators, and other copyright users, but some of the most valuable tools can fly under the radar. Here are five lesser-known Office resources that can help you better understand, register, and manage your creative works.”

Setting the Record Straight About America’s Copyright and AI Policy — “With U.S. policymakers and judges considering the very important question of how copyright law applies in the context of AI, especially AI training, there’s been an unfortunate deluge of falsehoods and myths spread by AI developers and others in a poor attempt to get policymakers and courts to grant them special copyright treatment for AI.”

Record labels claim AI generator Suno illegally ripped their songs from YouTube — “The updated lawsuit alleges that Suno ’employed code to access, extract, copy, and download’ copyrighted works from Universal, Sony, and Warner, and violated YouTube’s terms of service by circumventing the platform’s ‘rolling cipher’ encryption.”

‘Real Love’ copyright claim rejected — The breakbeat from the Honey Dripper’s 1973 track “Impeach the President” is instantly recognizable and has been sampled in hundreds of songs since its release. Read the court ruling this week dismissing a claim at the pleadings stage against Universal Music Publishing that its use in the Mary J. Blige track “Real Love” was not infringing.

Friday’s Endnotes – 09/19/25

By , September 19, 2025.

AI companies want copyright exemptions – for NZ creatives, the market is their best protection — “If fair dealing applied to AI models, copyright owners would basically become unwilling donors of AI firms’ seed capital. They wouldn’t even get a tax deduction! … Licensing offers hope that the economic benefits of AI technologies can be shared better. In New Zealand, it can help with appropriate use of Māori content in ways uncontrolled data scraping and copying don’t.”

When Tech Giants Cry Wolf: A Flawed Case Against Judicial Site Blocking — “Today, at least 55 countries employ some form of site blocking for copyright infringement, and the internet continues to thrive. The number of global internet users has more than doubled since 2010. Internet speeds are more than 11 times faster. And legal options to enjoy creative works have proliferated, with over 870 video streaming services globally. Moreover, a mountain of peer-reviewed evidence demonstrates that judicial site blocking is highly effective, reducing traffic to blocked sites by 80-90% while increasing legal consumption. Site blocking works and makes the internet stronger and safer for us all.”

The 18th-century legal case that changed the face of music copyright law — “With these words, the ‘musical work’ was legally born. Lord Mansfield certified that music was protected by the copyright act, dispelling previous doubt on the matter and ensuring that Bach would be remembered not only for his compositions but also for changing how the law views the art of music.”

Music labels, Internet Archive settle record-streaming copyright case — “The labels’ 2023 lawsuit said that the project functioned as an ‘illegal record store’ for more than 4,000 songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. The Archive denied the allegations and said the project was protected by the copyright doctrine of fair use.”

The upcoming Mio/konektra judgment: What the CJEU should decide regarding the copyright infringement test — “In this post, I will revisit the AG’s approach to the second issue above – that is: the infringement test – and try to articulate why the CJEU should NOT ‘depart’ from the approach established in yet another seminal decision (Infopaq). The Court should confirm that the copyright infringement test is based on originality, not – as proposed by the AG – the recognizability of what has been copied.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 09/12/25

By , September 12, 2025.

RSS co-creator launches new protocol for AI data licensing — “On the legal side, the RSL team has established a collective licensing organization, the RSL Collective, that can negotiate terms and collect royalties, similar to ASCAP for musicians or MPLC for films. As in music and film, the goal is to give licensors a single point of contact for paying royalties and provide rights holders a way to set terms with dozens of potential licensors at once.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster claim copyright infringement by AI startup Perplexity — “Filed in Manhattan federal court late Wednesday evening, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster accuse Perplexity in 55-page civil complaint of violating their copyrights both at the curation stage when it uses a software program called ‘PerplexityBot’ to crawl and scrape their websites for Perplexity’s ‘answer engine,’ and also at the input stage when it reproduces copyrighted articles that are responsive to user searches to prompt responses from its retrieval-augmented generation output of its large language model.”

The Case for using Small Language Models — “Because of their focused training data, SLMs are also faster and more cost-effective to build, fine-tune, and improve over time than LLMs. These qualities of SLMs can give businesses the agility to develop AI solutions that can quickly adapt to changing market dynamics, shifting customer expectations, or new regulatory demands without the lengthy development cycles and high sunk costs typically associated with LLMs.”

Apple Sued by Authors for Copyright Infringement — “On Friday, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a lawsuit in Northern California targeting Apple’s ‘OpenELM’ large language models, alleging the company ‘copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation.’ The suit accuses Apple of using the Books3 dataset of pirated books and employing its own proprietary Applebot to scrap the web and, potentially, other online ‘shadow libraries.'”

Did Showtime make a witch’s brew out of a novelist’s copyrighted characters? — “A writer who claimed that a streaming channel ‘blended attributes of her various characters in a cauldron’ in a popular horror-fantasy TV series did not show that the overlaps between the two works were so strikingly similar as to rule out the possibility of independent creation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 09/05/25

By , September 05, 2025.

Warner Bros. Joins Studios’ AI Copyright Battle Against Midjourney — “In the complaint, Warner Bros. alleges that Midjourney willfully creates both still images and video of its characters, including Superman, Batman, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tom and Jerry. The complaint also alleges that Midjourney recently eliminated guardrails that blocked users from creating videos that infringe on its IP.”

Mexico says works created by AI cannot be granted copyright — “The [Mexico Supreme Court]’s unanimous decision said that the Federal Copyright Law (LFDA) reserves authorship to humans, and that any creative invention generated exclusively by algorithms lacks a human author to whom moral rights can be attributed. According to the Supreme Court, automated systems do not possess the necessary qualities of creativity, originality and individuality that are considered human attributes for authorship.”

AI tech companies accused of illegally scraping copyrighted music in ICMP investigation — “The ICMP investigation claims that AI tools such as Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s CoPilot, Meta’s Llama 3, and more have all ‘scraped’ music from licensed platforms such as YouTube and Spotify to train their models ‘without permission nor respect for laws’.”

World’s largest sports piracy site shut down by police — “The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) said on Wednesday it had teamed up with police in Egypt to close down Streameast, which had been visited more than 1.6 billion times in the past year. It allowed millions to access pirated streams of sports such as Premier League football matches, Formula One races and Major League Baseball games.”

TikTok Can’t Escape Trial in Copyright Suit Over Video Tech — “TikTok Inc. must face a jury trial next month in a lawsuit brought by a Chinese software company accusing the social media giant of copying video- and audio-editing technology. Judge Susan Illston ruled Monday that Beijing Meishe Network Technology Co. owns the copyrights to the code at issue, rejecting TikTok’s arguments that the rights to the software weren’t transferred from Meishe’s partial owner.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 08/15/25

By , August 15, 2025.

Comparing AI Training to Human Learning Is Cartoonishly Absurd — “Analogizing AI processes to human processes may be helpful as a simplistic way to explain how certain aspects of AI work. However, relying on these analogies as a substitute for actual legal and policy analysis can lead to erroneous blurring of lines, resulting in poorly conceived laws and policies, which prioritize AI over humans and setting a very dangerous precedent for our future.”

Baby Shark song not plagiarised – South Korean top court — “South Korea’s Supreme Court has rejected a US composer’s allegation that the producers of the inescapably catchy children’s song Baby Shark plagiarised his work, ending a six-year-long legal battle. The court upheld two lower court verdicts that favoured Pinkfong, the South Korean company behind the tune with the “doo doo doo doo doo doo” refrain that has been streamed billions of times.”

Copyright and Piracy: Publishers Coordinate on the Anthropic Lawsuit, ‘A Moment of Reckoning’ — “So large is the class being formed—of both publishers and authors—that Anthropic in its defense is asserting that paying damages to publishers and authors could bankrupt the AI company.”

Which judge will decide fair use next in AI copyright litigation? Judge Saylor IV, most likely — “We have an updated prediction of which district court judge will have the next decision on fair use in the AI litigation. Technically, Judge Alsup will get another shot at deciding fair use in the remaining part of the lawsuit in Bartz v. Anthropic, set for trial on December 1, 2025, related to Anthropic’s downloading and possible retention of copies from shadow libraries.”

Australian authors challenge Productivity Commission’s proposed copyright law exemption for AI — Lucy Hayward, CEO of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), said the proposal gave ‘a free pass’ to multinational tech companies, such as Google, Meta and OpenAI, to continue using unauthorised copyrighted material to train their AI models. ‘Why should we create a situation where billion-dollar tech companies can profit off authors’ work, but not the creators who made the work? It’s an entirely absurd proposition,’ Hayward told ABC Arts.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 08/08/25

By , August 08, 2025.

Top Ten Noteworthy Copyright Stories from July 2025 — “After being dormant for much of the year, Congress was very busy on copyright issues in July—introducing copyright-related legislation and holding a hearing on AI and copyright piracy issues. There were many more significant copyright-related events in July. Here is a quick snapshot of top ten copyright news stories from July 2025.”

Key Trends in Shanghai’s Top 10 Copyright Cases for 2025 and Beyond — “Shanghai’s copyright landscape saw key developments over the last year, as the city’s Copyright Bureau unveiled its annual list of 10 high-impact copyright cases in July 2025. The cases cover civil, criminal, and administrative decisions, involving various fields such as software, games, films, music, and literature.”

Court in Spain puts a stop to unlicensed press summaries for copyright infringement — “A Barcelona court has taken a firm stand against the unauthorised use of press content, ruling that media summaries sold without a licence violate copyright law and undermine the sustainability of journalism.”

Authors oppose AI text mining proposal over copyright concerns — “The Australian Society of Authors has voiced opposition to a proposal from the Productivity Commission that suggests introducing a text and data mining exception to Australia’s Copyright Act. The interim report from the Productivity Commission, titled Harnessing data and digital technology, considers whether an exception allowing the training of artificial intelligence models on copyrighted works should be explored further in Australia. The report notes that large AI models have already made use of content from Australian creators without their consent or compensation, yet it suggests that the introduction of a text and data mining exception could be a potential way forward.”

Canadian Author Sues Four AI Companies for Copyright Infringement — “[J. B.] MacKinnon, author of The 100-Mile Diet and The Once and Future World, serves as the representative plaintiff in separate suits he filed in B.C. Supreme Court against Nvidia, Meta, Anthropic, and Databricks Inc. The cases target what MacKinnon described as unauthorized use of copyrighted material in developing large language models.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 07/25/25

By , July 25, 2025.

Why Courts Should Dismiss Challenges to Copyright Registrations Issued in the Interregnum — Former U.S. Copyright Office General Counsel Jon Baumgarten argues that trial courts should dismiss or decline to hear challenges to copyright registrations issued since May 22, when competing claims as to who is the Register of Copyrights arose, under the authority of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Reed Elsevier v Muchnick.

Ottawa weighs plans on AI, copyright as OpenAI fights Ontario court jurisdiction — “Canada’s artificial intelligence minister is keeping a close watch on court cases in Canada and the U.S. to determine next steps for Ottawa’s regulatory approach to AI. Some AI companies have claimed early wins south of the border, and OpenAI is now fighting the jurisdiction of an Ontario court to hear a lawsuit by news publishers.”

Transformative Use Analysis in Bartz v. Anthropic AI Case Marred by Fatal Flaws — “The court in Bartz v. Anthropic arrived at the conclusion that the unauthorized use of the plaintiffs’ works for training a generative AI model qualifies as fair use, but the order’s analyses of transformative use has many fatal flaws. The disregard for Ninth Circuit precedent and misapplication of the Supreme Court’s Warhol decision is nothing short of alarming, so much so that it’s hard to see how this decision will not be corrected on appeal.”

Trump Loses Copyright Fight Over Woodward Interview Recordings — “Trump’s primary theory—that he and Woodward were joint authors of the interviews—collided with both Second Circuit precedent and his own pleadings. Under Childress v. Taylor and Thomson v. Larson, joint authorship requires both independently copyrightable contributions and mutual intent to be co-authors at the time of creation.”

New York Court Tackles the Legality of AI Voice Cloning — “The court dismissed plaintiffs’ infringement claim with respect to the use of the plaintiffs’ voice recordings to train Lovo’s AI model, but with leave to amend. The court held that there was insufficient factual detail in the complaint regarding how the AI training process allegedly infringed the plaintiffs’ exclusive rights, but that it would be straightforward for plaintiffs to amend their complaint to make the appropriate allegations. In a footnote, the court noted that Lovo asserted in a single sentence that its training was fair use, but that if plaintiffs amended their complaint, and defendants again moved to dismiss, a more thorough fair-use defense would need to be articulated.”

Friday’s Endnotes – 07/18/25

By , July 18, 2025.

The Largest IP Theft in History: Takeaways from the Senate Hearing on AI and Copyright Piracy — “On July 16, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training. While some courts may struggle to articulate why these pervasive pirating activities of AI companies seem so disturbing—Senators on the Subcommittee took charge in demonstrating the ridiculous, un-American position that what they referred to as “the largest IP theft in history” should ever be condoned.”

US authors suing Anthropic can band together in copyright class action, judge rules — “U.S. District Judge William Alsup said the authors can bring a class action, opens new tab on behalf of all U.S. writers whose works Anthropic allegedly downloaded from ‘pirate libraries’ LibGen and PiLiMi to create a repository of millions of books in 2021 and 2022. Alsup said Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as 7 million books from the pirate websites, which could make it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors’ case is successful.”

Generative AI & Copyright Law in India: Who Owns Machine-Made Works? — “Although courts in India have not yet ruled definitively on generative AI and copyright ownership, recent judicial and regulatory developments signal growing concern and attention toward the issue.”

Can GenAI and Copyright Coexist? — “Gen AI has the potential to benefit industry and society in many ways. But achieving that potential will require more robust and transparent partnerships between technology firms and the creative industries. On our current path we risk killing the goose—or in this case the authors, musicians, coders, and filmmakers—who laid the golden eggs that are key to the present and future value of gen AI output.”

WeTransfer Changes Policy After Concern It Could Train AI on User’s Photos — “The controversy began after a recent update to WeTransfer’s terms appeared to grant the company broad rights over user content, including a clause referencing the use of data to ‘improve performance of machine learning models that enhance our content moderation process.’ This language raised alarms creative professionals, including photographers, some of whom interpreted the terms as giving WeTransfer permission to use, sell, or share their files with AI companies.”

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