Copyright

The UK government just backed down from its plan to let AI companies train on copyrighted works without permission. After fierce pushback from Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, and Dua Lipa, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall announced Wednesday that the government "no longer has a preferred option" on AI copyright policy. The reversal kills a proposed data bill that would have given creators only an opt-out clause after their work was already used. Continue Reading →

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Stephen Thaler's appeal over whether AI-generated art can receive copyright protection. Thaler applied for a copyright in 2018 covering a visual work his AI system DABUS created autonomously. The Copyright Office rejected it. A federal judge upheld that decision. The D.C. Circuit affirmed it. Now, the Supreme Court has let the ruling stand. The legal chain is complete: no human author, no copyright. Continue Reading →

Stanford and Yale researchers extracted 95.8% of a copyrighted novel, word for word, from Claude 3.7 Sonnet. Gemini 2.5 Pro gave up 76.8% of Harry Potter without even requiring a jailbreak. Grok 3 handed over 70.3%. GPT-4.1 was the most resistant at 4.0%, but it still coughed up text after enough attempts. Thirteen books were tested. The words came out. Continue Reading →

Meta scored a decisive victory in federal court this week. A lawsuit filed by thirteen authors – including Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden – accusing Meta of copyright infringement was largely dismissed by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria. Continue Reading →

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train its AI model, Claude, qualifies as fair use. This decision addresses the lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who alleged that Anthropic infringed their copyrights by using pirated versions of their books for AI training. Continue Reading →

In case you didn't know, today – whether or not you register your work with the copyright office – everything you create is immediately protected by U.S. copyright law. This has been true for your entire life, but the value of that constitutional protection may soon change. Continue Reading →

On March 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that works generated solely by AI without human involvement are not eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law. Continue Reading →

The U.S. Copyright Office’s latest report, Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability, provides critical insight into how AI-generated works fit—or don’t fit—within existing copyright law. The key takeaway is clear: for a work to be eligible for copyright protection, it must demonstrate human authorship. Continue Reading →

In a big win for SAG-AFTRA, the California State Senate has passed Assembly Bill 2602, setting a new standard for protecting performers from unauthorized AI replicas. Continue Reading →

Universal Music's recent lawsuit against AI startup Anthropic underscores a pressing issue at the intersection of AI and copyright law. The suit alleges that Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude reproduces copyrighted song lyrics almost verbatim, infringing on the rights of music publishers like Concord and Universal. Continue Reading →