Artificial intelligence, professionally covered
Copyright is AI's biggest legal battleground: training-data lawsuits, licensing deals and new policy on AI-generated works. This hub tracks the cases, rulings and deals that will define what AI can learn from.
A music publisher, not a label, is suing over compositions — and the billion-dollar figure everyone is reporting depends on the cases growing twentyfold first.
6m ago
Six months after a cease-and-desist over Seedance 2.0, the MPA has a framework with ByteDance that grants no rights, releases no claims and says nothing about training data.
16m ago
In the New York Times copyright MDL, Microsoft filed against sanctions sought from its own co-defendant — arguing a jury cannot be told to hold an adverse inference against only one of them.
4d ago
The largest AI music generator becomes the first customer of Musixmatch's Sentinel, screening prompts and outputs against a rights database. Disclosure stays optional.
Aug 9, 2026
The Merlin deal extends to the independent sector what Spotify agreed with Universal in May. Participation is optional, the product is an unreleased research preview, and the press release describes it only as fan-made covers and remixes.
Aug 4, 2026
The ruling denies protection to AI-generated pictures on the grounds that issuing commands to a model is technical work, not creative authorship. No court name, case number or ruling date has been published.
Aug 3, 2026
Judge Engelmayer let the core anti-circumvention claims proceed to discovery and threw out several others. Perplexity partly won, and the 22% fall in Reddit's stock that day was about something else.
Aug 1, 2026
IFPI's principles are live in MENA, Southeast Asia, South Africa and parts of Latin America. The two charts that matter most have committed to nothing.
Jul 31, 2026
The Landgericht München I found for GEMA against Suno on both limbs — the training and the output. It is a first-instance judgment, it is appealable, and it sets no damages figure.
Jul 31, 2026
KDDI's Buffmee answers only from about 150 licensed publications. It is a retrieval deal, not a training-data deal — and that difference is most of the economics.
Jul 28, 2026
Justice Amit Bansal refused to injunct ChatGPT, holding that storing a news agency's copyrighted work to train a model falls inside India's fair dealing exception — a sharp turn away from the US settlements.
Jul 25, 2026
USA Today's owner says it is prepared to delist from Google within a year, People Inc. calls a full block "100% on the table," and Reddit has discussed ending Google's $60-million-a-year AI access.
Jul 22, 2026
Blocked from expanding its original case, Sony filed a fresh federal lawsuit on July 20 — and as the only major label without a Udio license, it is now swinging for maximum statutory damages.
Jul 21, 2026
A federal judge signed off on the landmark deal on July 20, clearing roughly $3,000-3,100 per book for more than 480,000 works and closing the case that first put a price on pirated AI training data.
Jul 21, 2026
A bill reviewed by Reuters would grant full copyright to AI-assisted works with 'sufficient' human creative direction — and a new, weaker layer of related rights to works AI generates almost on its own.
Jul 17, 2026
Files given to 404 Media by a hacker list more than two million YouTube Music clips among Suno's training sources — landing in the middle of a copyright suit where labels accuse the company of circumventing YouTube's protections.
Jul 16, 2026
A New York Times-led coalition says OpenAI claimed it could not search its training data for copyrighted journalism — while an engineer's deposition showed it had already done exactly that, before the first lawsuit was filed.
Jul 10, 2026
