Cases and their Developments

• AI music copyright cases (Concord Music Group v. Anthropic, others)

  Key issues: AI training, generative AI, fair use
  
  The music industry—via major publishers—has launched lawsuits over unauthorized use of musical works for AI training.

  • Ongoing 2025

• Andersen v. Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt

  Key issues: AI training, generative AI, fair use

  Visual artists sued these AI firms for copying their works to train AI image generators.

  • Aug 2024 (ongoing)
    
  • Aug 12 2024
    • Order granting in part and denying in part motions to dismiss 1st amended complaint

• Bartz v. Anthropic

  Key issues: AI training, copyright infringement, fair use
  
  Several book authors sued Anthropic over its alleged use of their copyrighted materials to train Anthropic’s large language models, including Claude. In June 2025, Anthropic won an early summary judgment ruling. In that ruling, the Court indicated that the training of LLMs using legally-acquired copyrighted materials (like scans of legally-purchased books) might constitute fair use, but that copyright owners could still sue if the works were pirated and then used to train models.

  Shortly after, the parties proposed what they described as the biggest public copyright settlement in history, with Anthropic agreeing to pay at least $1.5 billion to the class authors.
  
  Judge Alsup of the Northern District of California preliminarily approved the class settlement on September 25, 2025. A hearing for the final approval of the settlement is set for April 23, 2026.

• Britannica v. Perplexity

  Key issues: web scraping, grounding, AI training, search engines

  Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Inc. sued Perplexity AI, Inc., claiming that Perplexity’s use of their website content to “ground” its AI-powered “answer engine” infringed their copyrights.

• Disney and Universal v. Midjourney

  Key issues: model output, character cases, training data, generative AI

  Disney and Universal accused Midjourney’s AI generator of infringing by reproducing famous characters and artwork.

  • June 11, 2025 (newly filed)

• Getty Images v. AI companies

  Key issues: AI training, copyright infringement, fair use

  Getty Images sued several leading AI companies for allegedly using images without license for training models.

  • Ongoing 2025
  • November 7, 2025
    • The case is currently undergoing private Alternative Dispute Resolution (“ADR”)

• Kadrey v. Meta

  Key issues: AI training, copyright infringement, fair use
  
  Various authors brought this landmark case against Meta in the Northern District of California, alleging that Meta infringed copyrights when using the authors’ books to train Meta’s models.
  
  Meta prevailed on an initial partial motion for summary judgment in June 2025. The Court’s summary judgment ruling indicated that Meta’s use of the books for model training had a “further purpose” and “different character” than copying the books and that the use was “highly transformative.” The Court carefully limited its decision to the facts at hand, suggesting that the result may be different depending on the purposes of the model (e.g., whether it is used to create “competing works.”).
  
  The portion of the case that remains concerns Meta’s use of torrenting and uploading of copyrighted works. More recently, the book authors claimed that Meta produced significant evidence after the close of discovery and asked the Court for additional discovery related to Meta’s alleged torrenting and use of shadow libraries.

• OpenAI consolidated lawsuits

  Key issues: AI training, training data, AI outputs, fair use, LLMs

  OpenAI is facing numerous consolidated copyright suits from authors, publishers, news organizations, and others, with alleged infringement of massive datasets in training and allegedly infringing ChatGPT outputs at issue. The wave of copyright infringement lawsuits continued to expand, with numerous cases in the Southern District of New York and more in the Northern District of California. Eventually, the cases were consolidated into this multidistrict, consolidated class action in the Southern District of New York. In October 2025, the Court denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the direct infringement claim based on allegedly infringing outputs, noting that the authors’ consolidated complaint provided sufficient evidence for the pleading stage. The case is continuing forward, with additional discovery remaining, and many open issues, including fair use.

• Pierce et al v. Photobucket, Inc.

  Key issues: AI training, generative AI, fair use, website terms and conditions

  Plaintiffs who uploaded photographs to defendants' photo storage site filed a class action suit alleging defendant is licensing their photographs to third parties for training AI and for use of biometric data without their consent.

  • December 11, 2024, Filed

• Reddit, Inc. v. SerpApi LLC

  Key issues: web scraping, DMCA, circumventing copyright protection measures
  
  Reddit sued Perplexity AI and co-defendants allegedly involved in scraping web content from Reddit via Google search results pages. Among other allegations, Reddit claims that Perplexity violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using scraped Google-generated excerpts of Reddit content to help train its AI answer machine instead of licensing the content from Reddit.

• Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH v. ROSS Intelligence Inc.

  Key issues: AI training, training data, fair use, LLMs

  Thomson Reuters sued Ross for using Westlaw headnotes to train an AI research tool. The District of Delaware ruled for Thomson Reuters on direct infringement, rejecting Ross’s fair use defense. Ross appealed, and the appeal is currently pending before the Third Circuit. This means the case may be the first federal appellate court to decide the issue of fair use in the AI training context.

• Strike 3 Holdings, LLC et al v. Meta Platforms, Inc.

  Plaintiffs Strike 3 Holdings, LLC and Counterlife Media, LLC, own copyrights in thousands of adult films distributed via their own subscription websites. Plaintiffs filed suit in July 2-2025, alleging that Meta intentionally and systematically downloaded and distributed at least 2,000 of their copyrighted films using the BitTorrent protocol.