{"id":14520,"date":"2026-07-21T16:39:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/provimarcas.com\/?p=14520"},"modified":"2026-07-21T16:41:25","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T21:41:25","slug":"ai-generated-content-and-copyright-law-what-we-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/provimarcas.com\/en\/ai-generated-content-and-copyright-law-what-we-know\/","title":{"rendered":"AI-GENERATED CONTENT AND COPYRIGHT LAW: WHAT WE KNOW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary: AI-generated content, including text, art, and music, is not protected by copyright law in the United States. However, training AI on copyrighted works is in a legal gray area, with lawsuits challenging fair use and creator protections. Ongoing legal cases may change how copyright law applies to AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the moment, works created solely by artificial intelligence \u2014 even if produced from a text prompt written by a human \u2014 are not protected by copyright in the United States.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to training AI models, however, the use of copyrighted materials falls into a legal gray area, especially if the outputs compete with original works. For now, the fair use doctrine permits the use of copyrighted material under certain conditions without needing the permission of the owner. But pending lawsuits could change this.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is AI-Generated Content?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI-generated content refers to written text, video, code, audio and other media produced by generative AI tools. These machines are trained on large amounts of data, allowing them to create relevant outputs in response to a word, phrase, question or other kind of input.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gold copyright symbol on a computer keyboard<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image: Shutterstock<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

UPDATED BY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brennan Whitfield | Jul 21, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

REVIEWED BY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ellen Glover<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Summary: AI-generated content, including text, art, and music, is not protected by copyright law in the United States. However, training AI on copyrighted works is in a legal gray area, with lawsuits challenging fair use and creator protections. Ongoing legal cases may change how copyright law applies to AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the moment, works created solely by artificial intelligence \u2014 even if produced from a text prompt written by a human \u2014 are not protected by copyright in the United States.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to training AI models, however, the use of copyrighted materials falls into a legal gray area, especially if the outputs compete with original works. For now, the fair use doctrine permits the use of copyrighted material under certain conditions without needing the permission of the owner. But pending lawsuits could change this.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is AI-Generated Content?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI-generated content refers to written text, video, code, audio and other media produced by generative AI tools. These machines are trained on large amounts of data, allowing them to create relevant outputs in response to a word, phrase, question or other kind of input.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Generative AI has significantly altered the way we live, work and create in a short amount of time. As a result, the deluge of AI-generated text, images and music \u2014 and the process used to create them \u2014 has prompted a series of complicated legal questions. And they are challenging our understanding of ownership, fairness and the very nature of creativity itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Can AI Art Be Copyrighted?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has long been the posture of the U.S. Copyright Office that there is no copyright protection for works created by non-humans, including machines. Therefore, the product of a generative AI model cannot be copyrighted.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The root of this problem lies in how generative AI systems are trained. Like most other machine learning models, they work by identifying and replicating patterns in data. So, in order to generate an output like a written sentence or picture, it must first learn from the real work of actual humans.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If an AI image generator produces art that resembles the work of Georgia O\u2019Keefe, for example, that means it may have been trained on works that closely resemble or include the actual art of Georgia O\u2019Keefe, depending on the dataset used. Similarly, for an AI content generator to write in the style of Toni Morrison, it was likely trained with words written by Toni Morrison.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legally, these AI systems \u2014 including image generators, AI music generators and chatbots like ChatGPT \u2014 cannot be considered the author of the material they produce. Their outputs are simply a culmination of human-made work, much of which has been scraped from the internet and is copyright-protected in one way or another.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, how do we reconcile the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry with the knotty particulars of U.S. copyright law? That is something creatives, companies, courts and the United States government are trying to figure out.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Legal Gray Area of Human-AI Collaboration<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creative work that is the result of a collaboration between a human and machine, which is often the case with AI-generated creations, is a complicated matter.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf a machine and a human work together, but you can separate what each of them has done, then [copyright] will only focus on the human part,\u201d Daniel Gervais, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, told Built In. He mainly focuses on intellectual property law, and has written extensively on how it relates to artificial intelligence.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the human and machine\u2019s contributions are more intertwined, a work\u2019s eligibility for copyright depends on how much control or influence the human author had on the machine\u2019s outputs. \u201cIt really needs to be an authorial kind of contribution,\u201d Gervais said. \u201cIn that case, the fact that you worked with a machine would not exclude copyright protection.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Zarya of the Dawn and Its Impact on U.S. Copyright Law<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This threshold was put to the test in September of 2022, when the U.S. Copyright Office made history by granting the first known registration of a work produced with the help of text-to-image generator Midjourney: a graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn. Written by Kristina Kashtanova, the 18-page narrative had all the trappings of a typical comic book \u2014 characters, dialogue and plenty of images, all of which were generated using Midjourney.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just a few months later, the office reconsidered its decision and wound up partially canceling the work\u2019s copyright registration, claiming in a letter to Kashtanova\u2019s attorney that it had \u201cnon-human authorship\u201d that had not been taken into account. The book\u2019s text, as well as the \u201cselection, coordination, and arrangement\u201d of its \u201cwritten and visual elements,\u201d remained protected. The images themselves did not, though, because they were \u201cnot the product of human authorship,\u201d but rather of text prompts that generated unpredictable outputs based on its training data. The office also deemed whatever editing Kashtanova did to the images as \u201ctoo minor and imperceptible to supply the necessary creativity for copyright protection.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The office has since released a more sweeping policy change to address all AI-human creative collaborations moving forward \u2014 a response to what it sees as new trends in registration activity. The document essentially doubles down on its stance with Zarya of the Dawn, reiterating that the term \u201cauthor\u201d is not extended to non-humans, including machines. It also states that if a human simply types in a prompt and a machine generates complex written, visual or musical works in response, the \u201ctraditional elements of authorship\u201d have been executed by AI, a non-human. Therefore, it is not protected by copyright.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Federal courts have also affirmed the U.S. Copyright Office\u2019s position that AI-created artwork cannot be copyrighted. In August 2023, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with the agency against computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who was seeking copyright protection for an image created by AI software.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright Lawsuits Surge in the Wake of Generative AI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some creators and companies believe their content has been stolen by generative AI companies, and are now seeking to strip these companies of the protective shield of fair use in a series of pending lawsuits.   <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Company Lawsuits <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Getty Images is suing Stability AI (the company behind Stable Diffusion) for copying and processing millions of images that are protected by copyright, as well as their associated metadata owned by Getty Images, without getting permission or providing compensation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

TikTok settled a lawsuit in 2021 with voice actress Bev Standing, who claims the company used her voice without permission for its text-to-speech feature.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times joined the legal struggle as well in 2023 and again in 2025, first suing Open AI and Microsoft in 2023 for using millions of NYT articles without compensation in order to train AI models, and then suing Perplexity in 2025 for scraping NYT content and providing information that directly competes with what the publication offers readers. According to NPR\u2019s sources, if courts find that OpenAI illegally used Times articles to train its models, OpenAI could be forced to destroy its LLM data set and rebuild it from scratch. Additional U.S. newspapers, including The New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, have sued Microsoft and Open AI, creating more legal headaches for the AI duo.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Major music publishers like Universal Music are targeting Anthropic, claiming the company illegally trained its chatbot Claude AI on copyrighted song lyrics. The publishers also called for greater \u201cguardrails\u201d to ensure Anthropic doesn\u2019t copy song lyrics moving forward. Meanwhile, AI music startups Suno and Uncharted Labs are the center of another AI music lawsuit, led by record labels like Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In June 2025, one of these lawsuits reached its conclusion, with a federal judge in San Francisco handing a mixed ruling to a group of authors who alleged that Anthropic unfairly used their published works to train its models. The judge held that AI companies may legally use copyrighted materials to train their large language models \u2014 so long as they obtain the works legally \u2014 but found that the manner in which Anthropic acquired some of its training data constituted piracy. The company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit (about $3,000 per pirated work), making it the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright cases.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Class-Action Lawsuits  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artists Sarah Anderson, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against both Stability AI and Midjourney, both of which use Stable Diffusion to generate their images. The suit claims that these artists\u2019 work was wrongfully used to train Stable Diffusion, and that the images generated in the style of those authors directly compete with their own work \u2014 an important point in the matter of fair use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUntil now, when a purchaser seeks a new image \u2018in the style\u2019 of a given artist, they must pay to commission or license an original image from that artist. Now, those purchasers can use the artist\u2019s works contained in Stable Diffusion along with the artist\u2019s name to generate new works in the artist\u2019s style without compensating the artist at all,\u201d the complaint reads. \u201cThe harm to artists is not hypothetical \u2014 works generated by AI image products \u2018in the style\u2019 of a particular artist are already sold on the internet, siphoning commissions from the artists themselves.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In August 2024, U.S. District Judge William Orrick upheld all copyright infringement and trademark claims in the case. The lawsuit is set to move forward, providing an early victory for artists while dealing a blow to any AI company that uses Stable Diffusion.  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writers have also tried to bring class-action lawsuits against top AI companies. Nonfiction writers Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage have sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming the companies \u201csimply stole\u201d content from their works and must compensate them. The pair of writers want to represent a class of writers that could number in the tens of thousands. This comes on the heels of fiction writers suing OpenAI and seeking to establish a class-action lawsuit in late 2023.        <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Questions Around Authorship and Competition   <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. Copyright Office\u2019s stance on excluding machines from being considered authors could throw a wrench in the Stable Diffusion lawsuit and many others, according to Rob Heverly, an associate professor at Albany Law School who specializes in the intersection of technology and law.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn order for there to be infringement, there has to be an author. So, if there isn\u2019t an author, I don\u2019t know that there can be infringement,\u201d Heverly told Built In. \u201cIf we\u2019re not going to hold the technology maker liable for the technology itself, then the creator of the output is the AI. But we\u2019ve already said they\u2019re not an author. So if they\u2019re not an author then they can\u2019t create an infringing work.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amid all these lawsuits, the U.S. Copyright Office concluded in May 2025 that AI developers who use copyrighted works to train models that generate \u201cexpressive content that competes with\u201d original works are going beyond the scope of the fair use doctrine. According to the report, fair use does not apply when AI outputs closely resemble and compete with original works in their existing markets. For example, if a model trained on copyrighted horror novels is used to generate a book that mimics the style and themes of a specific horror author, the resulting content would directly compete with the author\u2019s work. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, the fair use doctrine\u2019s place in the ongoing legal saga of generative AI is up in the air as the courts continue to untangle a web of lawsuits and public discussions on AI and fair use persist.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For instance, in September 2025, technology policy coalition group Chamber of Progress used the Trump administration\u2019s request for inputs on AI regulation to argue that the use of copyrighted material for AI model training should be classified as fair use, exempting companies from being liable of statutory damages for the practice. Furthermore, they urged the U.S. government to intervene by seeking to rationalize and reform the framework of high statutory damages, arguing that the threat of lawsuits can hinder AI innovation and coerce AI companies into settlements.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Creators and Companies Take Action to Protect Copyrighted Works Against AI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While generative AI hangs in legal limbo, creators are still worried about their work or style being used to train generators without permission or compensation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe large majority of independent artists make their living through commissioned works,\u201d Ben Zhao, a computer science professor at the University of Chicago, told Built In. But, the websites they post their work on are being scraped by AI models in order to learn and then mimic that particular style. \u201cArtists are literally being replaced by models that have been trained on their own work.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

To help, Zhao and his team designed a new tool called Glaze. If an artist wants to put a creation online without the threat of an image generator copying their style, they can upload it to Glaze first and choose an art style different from their own. The software then makes mathematical changes to the artist\u2019s work on a pixel level so it looks different to a computer, rendering it useless as an effective piece of training data.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other companies are taking a more offensive approach. Shutterstock, a stock imagery site that was \u201ccritical\u201d to the training of OpenAI\u2019s DALL-E models, according to CEO Sam Altman, has gone so far as to pay content creators if their work is used to develop generative AI models.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And Shutterstock isn\u2019t alone. Generative AI startup Bria trains its models exclusively on what it calls \u201cresponsibly sourced\u201d data sets, and it pays royalties to artists and stock image providers when their creations have been used to generate an image. \u201cWe pay back a royalty according to the output,\u201d co-founder and CEO Yair Adato explained. \u201cSo if somebody generates a specific art in the style of the artist, then the artist will have the right to say how much money he wants on this synthetic creation. And then we will split the revenue.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Future of AI Copyright<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the use of creators\u2019 work in generative AI models continues to go unchecked, many experts in this space believe it could spell big trouble \u2014 not only for the human creators themselves, but the technology too.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen these AI models start to hurt the very people who generate the data that it feeds on \u2014 the artists \u2014 it\u2019s destroying its own future,\u201d Zhao said. \u201cSo really, when you think about it, it is in the best interest of AI models and model creators to help preserve these industries. So that there is a sustainable cycle of creativity and improvement for the models.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Approaches to AI Copyright Laws<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the United States, much of this preservation will be incumbent on the courts, where creators and companies are duking it out right now. Looking ahead, the level at which U.S. courts protect and measure human-made inputs in generative AI models could be reminiscent of what we\u2019ve seen globally, particularly in other Western nations.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The United Kingdom is one of only a handful of countries to offer copyright protection for works generated solely by a computer. The European Union, which has a much more preemptive approach to legislation than the U.S., has crafted a sweeping AI Act that has taken effect and is set to address a lot of the concerns with generative AI.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it is ultimately determined that AI companies have infringed on certain creators\u2019 copyrighted work, it could mean a lot more lawsuits in the coming years \u2014 and a potentially expensive penalty for the companies at fault.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne thing you have to know about copyright law is, for infringement of one thing only \u2014 it could be a text, an image, a song \u2014 you can ask the court for $150,000,\u201d Gervais said. \u201cSo imagine the people who are scraping millions and millions of works.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Key Developments in AI and Copyright Law<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Court rulings, legal settlements and legislative proposals are rapidly reshaping the boundaries between copyright protection and artificial intelligence.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below are some of the major developments that illustrate how policymakers, judges and industry groups are responding to disputes over creative ownership and AI innovation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Federal Judge Approves Anthropic\u2019s Bartz v. Anthropic Lawsuit Settlement (July 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. district judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on Anthropic\u2019s $1.5 billion settlement to resolve the class-action Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit brought by a group of authors, which accused the company of misusing copyrighted books to train its Claude AI chatbot. Marking the largest known settlement of a U.S. copyright case, the court-approved payout provides monetary compensation to authors and publishers that are part of the settlement. However, some authors and publishers opted out of the settlement and have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that remain ongoing.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Google Sued in Class Action Lawsuit for Training Gemini on Copyrighted Works (July 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Major publishers Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier, along with author Scott Turow, have filed a class action lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for violations of the Copyright Act. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The lawsuit alleges that Google willfully infringed copyrights by using millions of copyrighted books and academic journal articles to train its Gemini AI models without authorization. The plaintiffs claim Google exceeded the strictly limited, snippet-sharing purposes for which it originally obtained these works \u2014 such as through Google Books and Google Play Books \u2014 and intentionally stripped copyright management information to conceal the unauthorized use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times Amends Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft (June 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times amended its 2023 copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, modifying one claim against Microsoft and dropping a claim against OpenAI. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on June 25, 2026, The New York Times accused Microsoft of encouraging OpenAI to train its AI systems using copyrighted articles from the publication and providing services used to help with this AI training. While The New York Times dropped a claim against OpenAI to streamline the case, a Times spokesperson emphasized that its core claims about copyright infringement by the tech companies \u201cremain the same from the day we filed the lawsuit.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor Swift Files Trademark Applications to Potentially Protect Likeness From AI Misuse (April 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor Swift filed three new trademark applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, an action theorized by attorneys to protect the musician\u2019s voice, image and likeness from potential AI misuse and AI depictions without her consent. Two of the filed applications are sound trademarks covering Swift\u2019s voice, while the third filed application is a visual trademark covering a photograph of Swift holding a guitar during one of her Eras Tour concerts. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These actions follow similar lawsuits from celebrities looking to protect their likeness from AI misuse; Matthew McConaughey, for example, filed eight trademark applications covering his face and voice to prevent AI apps from simulating his likeness without permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster Sue OpenAI (March 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Encyclopedia Britannica, which owns Merriam-Webster\u2019s dictionary and its online platform, alleges that OpenAI violated copyright law in a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York federal court. According to Britannica, OpenAI scraped some 100,000 digital articles without permission, using ChatGPT\u2019s RAG tool to generate responses to user queries. Encyclopedia Britannica also has an ongoing lawsuit against Perplexity.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Supreme Court Declines to Hear AI Copyright Appeal and Upholds AI Works Cannot Be Copyrighted (March 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from computer scientist Stephen Thaler, who sought copyright protection for a visual artwork titled \u201cA Recent Entrance to Paradise,\u201d which was generated by his AI system, DABUS. By refusing to take up the case, the justices left intact lower court rulings that stated works that did not have a human creator are ineligible for copyright protection. The decision follows a similar refusal by the court in 2023 to hear Thaler\u2019s challenge regarding patents for AI-generated inventions, reinforcing the current legal standard that only humans can be recognized as authors or inventors.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bandcamp Bans AI-Generated Music From its Platform (January 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bandcamp, a major music distribution platform, announced a policy prohibiting music that has been generated \u201cwholly or in substantial part\u201d by AI in order to protect human creativity and fan confidence on its platform. The company also prohibited using AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles, and clarified that data scraping or training AI models on its content is strictly forbidden. To enforce these rules, Bandcamp has encouraged users to flag suspicious content through its reporting tools and reserves the right to remove any music tracks suspected of being AI-generated.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disney Licenses Characters to OpenAI\u2019s Sora Video Tool (December 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Disney and OpenAI struck a $1 billion, three-year partnership, marking a major turning point in the AI copyright battle. Under the agreement, Disney will license more than 200 characters from its Disney, Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars properties for use in OpenAI\u2019s Sora AI video generator, allowing users to create short, prompt-driven videos featuring icons like Mickey Mouse and Darth Vader beginning in early 2026. Disney will also become a major OpenAI customer\u2014using ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs to build internal tools and new offerings for Disney+\u2014and receive equity plus warrants as part of its investment. The deal signals a strategic shift from legal opposition to collaboration between Hollywood and the generative AI industry, giving Disney influence over how its intellectual property is used while also setting a potential blueprint for AI licensing in entertainment.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The New York Times Sues Perplexity for Copyright Infringement (December 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On December 5, 2025, The New York Times filed a federal lawsuit against Perplexity AI, alleging the AI search engine illegally copied and distributed millions of its copyrighted articles, videos and podcasts. The complaint claims Perplexity\u2019s \u201canswer engine\u201d generates responses that are often \u201cverbatim or substantially similar\u201d to Times content, effectively creating a substitute product that deprives the publisher of subscription and advertising revenue. Furthermore, The New York Times accused Perplexity of trademark dilution for generating AI hallucinations \u2014 fabricated content falsely attributed to the newspaper.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chicago Tribune Sues Perplexity for Copyright Infringement (December 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On December 4, 2025, the Chicago Tribune filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against AI search startup Perplexity AI, accusing the company of unlawfully scraping millions of its copyrighted articles. The suit alleges that the Perplexity engine systematically copies and distributes the Chicago Tribune\u2019s content to generate direct, substitutive answers, thereby bypassing the newspaper\u2019s paywalls and stealing subscription and advertising revenue. This legal action is a significant point in the growing conflict over how AI companies collect and repurpose copyrighted journalistic material.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

German Court Says OpenAI Violated Copyright Laws (November 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A regional court in Munich, Germany reportedly ruled that OpenAI violated the nation\u2019s copyright laws by training ChatGPT\u2019s underlying models on licensed musical work without permission. The decision stems from a November 2024 lawsuit filed by GEMA, the group that handles music rights in Germany, who claims the company scraped protected lyrics by popular artists to hone the chatbot\u2019s language capabilities.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

OpenAI has been ordered to pay an undisclosed amount in damages to GEMA, but said in a statement that it \u201cdisagrees with the ruling\u201c and is \u201cconsidering next steps.\u201d Meanwhile, GEMA celebrated the decision as \u201cthe first landmark AI ruling in Europe,\u201d saying it could have implications for other types of art as well. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToday, we have set a precedent that protects and clarifies the rights of authors: even operators of AI tools such as ChatGPT must comply with copyright law,\u201d GEMA chief executive Tobias Holzm\u00fcller said in a statement. \u201cToday, we have successfully defended the livelihoods of music creators.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. District Judge Allows Class-Action Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft to Proceed (October 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Southern District of New York Judge Sidney Stein allowed a class-action lawsuit brought by numerous authors, including George R.R. Martin, against OpenAI and Microsoft to proceed. The judge ruled that a reasonable jury could find that the allegedly infringing outputs generated by AI, such as an AI-generated outline for a Game of Thrones sequel, to be \u201csubstantially similar\u201d to the plaintiffs\u2019 copyrighted works, thereby potentially constituting copyright infringement.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the decision allows the authors\u2019 claims regarding infringing AI outputs to move forward, it did not resolve whether the defendants are protected by the key legal defense of \u201cfair use.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion Settlement for Bartz v. Anthropic Case (September 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion class-action settlement applying to approximately 500,000 works, compensating around $3,000 per work and requiring the destruction of improperly acquired content \u2014 a landmark resolution in AI copyright litigation from the Bartz v. Anthropic case. This settlement is the largest public copyright recovery in U.S. history and may catalyze licensing frameworks in the AI industry.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthropic Using Copyrighted Works for AI Training Ruled as Fair Use (July 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In July 2025, in the Northern District of California, District Judge William Alsup ruled that using legally purchased copyrighted content for training large language models (in the case Bartz v. Anthropic) constituted fair use. These outcomes contrast with earlier rulings, demonstrating emerging judicial nuances in balancing transformative use against infringement.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

U.S. Copyright Office Publishes Part 3 of AI Report (May 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released the pre-publication version of Part 3 of its Copyright and Artificial Intelligence report, focusing on generative AI training. It concluded that using copyrighted materials for AI model development may constitute prima facie infringement, warned that models themselves could infringe if outputs closely resemble training data and emphasized that \u201ctransformative\u201d arguments are not inherently valid.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Delaware Federal Court Ruled Against AI Training as Fair Use (February 2025)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the U.S. District Court for Delaware ruled that ROSS Intelligence using copyrighted Westlaw headnotes to train an AI-driven legal research search tool did not qualify for fair use \u2014 marking a foundational precedent rejecting AI training under the doctrine in certain contexts. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AI Copyright Disclosure Bill Introduced in U.S. Congress (April 2024)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In April 2024, California Representative Adam Schiff introduced the Generative AI Copyright Disclosure Act to the U.S. Congress, requiring AI firms to notify the Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office of copyrighted works used in generative AI training at least 30 days before publicly releasing an AI model. The bill was not signed into law, but it was supported by creative industry associations and reflected growing pressure for transparency in AI data use.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ELVIS Act Enacted in Tennessee (March 2024)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On March 21, 2024, the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act) was signed into law in Tennessee by Governor Bill Lee, which criminalizes the unauthorized cloning of performer, songwriter and music industry professional voices using AI technologies. The ELVIS Act is the first enacted U.S. legislation \u2014 and Tennessee is the first U.S. state \u2014 to specifically protect musicians from unauthorized use of their voices via AI. Effective July 1, 2024, the ELVIS Act signaled early legislative engagement with AI-driven intellectual property risks.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Information take from:\u00a0<\/strong>https:\/\/builtin.com\/artificial-intelligence\/ai-copyright<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summary: AI-generated content, including text, art, and music, is not protected by copyright law in the United States. 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