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Copyright

31 items across 23 editions · appeared in the last 5 editions in a row. First seen Thu 17 Sep, last seen Sun 1 Nov. Traced across 1 weekly review.

How this story has evolved

From the week in review: the connections, developments and open questions filed under Copyright, newest week first.

Week of 28 September – 4 October 2026

Development · Tue 29 Sep, Wed 30 Sep
Third Circuit holds Westlaw's 2,243 headnotes copyrightable and ROSS's AI training not fair use

The opinion in No. 25-2153, Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH and West Publishing Corp v. ROSS Intelligence Inc, was argued 11 June 2026 and filed 29 September 2026 before Judges Restrepo, Montgomery-Reeves and Bove, with Judge Montgomery-Reeves writing. It holds: "Because Thomson Reuters's 2,243 headnotes are original enough for copyright protection and ROSS's use of the headnotes was not fair, we will AFFIRM."

Open question
Does the Third Circuit's reasoning apply to models that generate text, or only to ones that retrieve it?

The court expressly reserved the question. Footnote 7 states that "Unlike the AI models in Bartz and In re: OpenAI, ROSS's AI platform cannot generate original expression", and cites Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, Kadrey v. Meta Platforms and the Justice Department's statement of interest in the OpenAI litigation without deciding them. Reuters reported on 30 September that the court’s reasoning was sealed, and MediaPost that the opinion was temporarily sealed pending the parties’ confidentiality requests and expected to be unsealed afterwards.

Sunday, 1 November 2026

Plaintiffs' filing says a former Meta researcher admitted torrenting Books3 and deleting it "due to all this litigation" Single source

TorrentFreak
  • TorrentFreak reports on a joint status report filed by rightsholders and Meta in the consolidated author and publisher cases before Judge Vince Chhabria in the Northern District of California. The rightsholders say former Meta FAIR researcher Stephen Roller, who worked at Meta from 2017 to 2023, admitted in a deposition that he torrented Books3 and knowingly distributed it, and that he deleted his copy about a year ago "[d]ue to all this litigation", as "it seem[ed] contentious to have copies of The Pile".
  • Meta's account in the same filing is that Roller "did not know when he downloaded a copy of the 'The Pile' via torrent, and did not testify that his download of the 'The Pile' was for Meta or at Meta, noting it could have been for himself or for another employer", that the deleted copy sat on his personal computer, and that he removed it more than two years after leaving because he "didn't need it".
  • This matters because, TorrentFreak notes, the court previously ruled that training Llama on books was fair use, leaving Meta's BitTorrent downloads as the main open issue. In August Meta told Entrepreneur Media it did not believe it had obtained Books3 through BitTorrent. Plaintiffs also say Meta has still not produced command history files from the servers used during its torrenting periods, despite court orders; Meta says it has produced substantial quantities of logs and is still searching backups.
  • The plaintiffs also want an internal Google Drive folder titled "ML Books"; Meta says that request came more than a month after discovery closed on 9 October and that it is investigating. The deposition transcript itself is not public, every characterisation above is one side's account in a court filing, and Entrepreneur Media's case is set for trial in spring 2027.
MetaCopyright

Saturday, 31 October 2026

UK CMA opens a Competition Act investigation into Meta's terms letting it use publishers' content for AI

Competition and Markets Authority
  • The CMA said on 30 October it "has launched an investigation into whether Meta's commercial terms for businesses using its platforms and services breach competition law", and "will examine whether Meta is abusing a dominant position by imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers". The terms "allow Meta to access and use content from news publishers' websites to develop and provide its own products and services".
  • The CMA's specific concern is consent: the terms "could allow it to collect content from the websites of businesses and publishers that use its services and then use it to develop and provide its own products and services, including its AI features – without those businesses getting a choice on if or how their content is used".
  • The timeline shows the terms being pushed back under pressure. Meta originally planned to introduce the changes on 30 October but, "following active engagement with the CMA, announced that implementation would be delayed until 20 November"; it then announced on 28 October "a pause to the roll out of its commercial terms, pending a consultation with industry groups".
  • The CMA is using its Competition Act 1998 powers so it can "urgently investigate" concerns from stakeholders including the News Media Association and Movement for an Open Web. It must first assess whether Meta holds a dominant position in a relevant UK market; no finding has been made and no outcome or remedy is set.
MetaUKCopyrightPrivacy

Anthropic files an IETF draft for a robots.txt AI-training opt-out token; Microsoft will honour it from February 2027 mixedCompany claim

IETF Datatracker·Microsoft Bing Blogs
  • The Internet-Draft "Machine-Readable Training Preference Signal", dated 30 October 2026 and authored by Kevin Kelley of Anthropic, describes "how a service operator binds usage preferences (e.g., \"no AI training\") to paths by writing ordinary robots.txt groups keyed by a per-purpose policy token in the User-Agent line". Its stated virtue is that it changes nothing: "It introduces no new directive names and no new grammar: the path language, longest-match precedence, and group structure of robots.txt are not changed."
  • Microsoft says it "is working with other industry participants to bring a shared AI training preference to site owners and publishers" and commits to dates: "Starting February 1, 2027, Microsoft will honor the new preferences as it crawls." Publishers relying on NoArchive or NoCache are urged to act before 1 March 2027, and temporary grounding preferences set in Bing Webmaster Tools apply "until recrawl or September 30, 2027, whichever is earlier".
  • Microsoft also adds a page-level AI Grounding preference with a new "DisallowExtended" value that "limits grounding use to Microsoft-operated experiences such as AI Mode, AI Overview, Copilot, and Microsoft 365, and excludes grounding services Microsoft provides to third parties". It warns publishers who use it will "see reduced brand visibility in AI experiences" — the opt-out carries a traffic cost.
  • Two caveats the reader should hold. The datatracker page states plainly: "This I-D is not endorsed by the IETF and has no formal standing in the IETF standards process." And nothing is honoured today — Microsoft's own date is February 2027, and we could not open Google's or OpenAI's statements directly from this environment, so we do not report their commitments here.
AnthropicMicrosoftCopyrightOpen WeightsUS Federal Policy

Two more amicus briefs land in the OpenAI copyright litigation, one against market dilution and one against licensing impossibility Single source

Authors Alliance·TheWrap
  • Authors Alliance says that "on October 29, Authors Alliance asked the court for leave to file an amicus brief in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation", supporting the defendants' summary judgment motions but "focuses on one issue only: whether 'market dilution' is a kind of harm that copyright law recognizes". Its brief argues copyright "has never treated every economic effect of a new expression as a copyright injury" and that "a thousand new romance novels that take nothing protectable from a plaintiff's book inflict no more cognizable harm than one does".
  • The theory being fought over has a traceable lineage: Authors Alliance says market dilution "comes from Judge Chhabria's 2025 decision in Kadrey v. Meta", that "Judge Alsup rejected a similar argument in Bartz v. Anthropic", and that the class plaintiffs have now asked Judge Stein to adopt it. The organisation says it takes no position on the other questions in the case.
  • Pushing the other way, TheWrap reports the Human Consent Foundation — associated with Cate Blanchett — and a coalition including CAA, the Music Artists Coalition, the National Association of Voice Actors and the Creators Coalition on Artificial Intelligence filed a 31-page brief in the Southern District of New York on Friday, attacking the argument that licensing is impractical: "Defendants have argued that licensing creative works for AI training is cost-prohibitive... The facts demonstrate otherwise. The creative industries already have in place a proven infrastructure and workflows to clear rights for dispersed works at scale and cost-effectively."
  • The brief cites more than a century of collective licensing frameworks that "operate as centralized clearinghouses that manage rights for entire repertoires through blanket licenses and automated, meta-data driven systems", naming CISAC and Broadcast Music, Inc. An appendix carries statements from figures including Anne Hathaway, Bette Midler, Emma Thompson, Helen Mirren, Ron Howard and Madonna. These are amicus filings, not rulings; representatives for OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to TheWrap. We read the Authors Alliance post and TheWrap's report, not the briefs themselves.
OpenAIMicrosoftCopyrightUS Federal PolicyMetaAnthropic

Friday, 30 October 2026

Wikimedia asks the SDNY to split fair use in the OpenAI litigation: lawful for training, not for retrieval

Wikimedia Foundation·Unite.AI
  • The Wikimedia Foundation says it filed an amicus brief in the Southern District of New York in "In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation," which it describes as "12 combined lawsuits against OpenAI, the most well-known of them being The New York Times Co. v Microsoft and OpenAI." Per Unite.AI the filing is a letter motion for leave addressed to Judge Sidney H. Stein, dated October 29, 2026, styled as supporting neither party, with a proposed brief of 5,831 words against the court's 6,000-word cap.
  • The Foundation's position is a line drawn mid-pipeline: training on copyrighted content "should be considered fair if it is being used for training LLMs that are something new and different from the original sources," while for retrieval-augmented generation and newer grounding techniques "the use of copyrighted works should not be considered fair," with companies required to respect each publisher's licence — for Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
  • This is a notable intervention because Wikipedia is among the most heavily used training corpora, and its steward is arguing against the industry on the retrieval side while conceding the training side. CEO Bernadette Meehan: "We are taking a position in this case to defend the free and open human knowledge that Wikipedia depends on." The Foundation says Wikipedia has "more than 67 million articles across 300 languages" and that "every month, nearly 250,000 volunteers contribute their time."
  • Nothing has been decided. Unite.AI reports that "Judge Stein must grant the Foundation leave before its proposed brief is formally accepted," and does not report a ruling either on leave or on fair use. Counsel of record is Rhett O. Millsaps II of Lex Lumina LLP. The brief itself was not read on a public docket here; the positions above come from the Foundation's own announcement.
CopyrightOpenAIUS Federal Policy

California judge lets a former NPR host's NotebookLM voice claims against Google proceed on all four counts

Radio Ink·Radio & Television Business Report
  • Both outlets report that Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Shella Deen overruled Google LLC's demurrer to all four causes of action in David Greene's complaint — a statutory right of publicity under California Civil Code section 3344, unfair competition, common law misappropriation, and quasi-contract and unjust enrichment — while sustaining Alphabet Inc.'s demurrer with leave to amend, giving Greene 10 days from notice to file an amended complaint limited to Alphabet's liability.
  • The complaint alleges Google used recordings of Greene's voice to create the default male voice in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews, and cites a forensic voice-recognition firm that found "relatively high" evidence of a match.
  • Deen's reasoning is the part that travels. On whether a radio host's voice is widely known: "That distinction is difficult to maintain for a radio broadcaster. A radio host reaches the audience through the voice, and it is reasonable to infer that the voice is widely known." She added: "The court recognizes that this is a novel application of a statute enacted well before generative AI." Per Radio Ink, the court rejected Google's argument that the Copyright Act preempts the claims, finding a voice is not copyrightable and that the claims concern the program's outputs, not its inputs.
  • This is a ruling on the pleadings, not a finding of liability — Deen also wrote that whether Google made the voice from Greene's recordings or another source "is a factual question." The order was filed on October 23; the in-window event is the first reporting of it, on 29 October. No docket number appeared in either report, and the order itself was not read.
CopyrightGoogle DeepMindUS State PolicyPrivacy

Reddit says search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week and will shift to a logged-in experience mixedCompany claim

TechCrunch
  • On its third-quarter earnings call Reddit said it is transitioning to a primarily "logged-in experience," after "search traffic referrals dropped by more than 1 million referrals on average per week in October." It warned that if the trend continues, daily active users could decline by a low-double-digit percentage by next quarter.
  • The damage is already visible in the US: global daily active users were flat quarter-over-quarter at 130.3 million, up 12% year over year, while "U.S. daily active users dropped from 53.2 million in Q2 to 50.7 million in Q3 and were down 2% year-over-year."
  • This is a measured effect of AI search on an open web property, and the response is to close it: TechCrunch reports the move "is designed to protect its data from AI scraping, allowing the company to instead forge lucrative licensing deals with model providers." Monetisation is meanwhile improving — revenue rose 53% to $895 million, net income 74% to $283 million, and US average revenue per daily active user 53% to $13.82, with non-advertising revenue including AI data licensing up 35% to $48 million.
  • The shift is not immediate or total: Reddit said it will first run tests in select markets outside the US in the fourth quarter, has no timeline for a worldwide rollout, and will keep an anonymous browsing option. The causal link between AI search and the referral decline is Reddit's own characterisation.
LaborIncidentsCopyrightAgents

Thursday, 29 October 2026

Copyright Office DMCA notice intends to renew the literary-works text-and-data-mining exemption over publisher objection Update

Federal Register
  • Published 28 October, the notice of proposed rulemaking in the tenth triennial DMCA section 1201 proceeding "announces the Register's intention to recommend all but one of the existing exemptions for renewal, and initiates three rounds of public comment on newly proposed exemptions". Initial comments are due 7 December 2026, response comments 22 February 2027 and reply comments 22 March 2027, and "comments submitted may not exceed twenty-five pages per class, excluding documentary evidence".
  • The Association of American Publishers opposed renewal of the text-and-data-mining exemption for literary works, asserting that "concerns that unprotected corpora created under the exemption will be siphoned off to train generative [artificial intelligence ('AI')] models" have been heightened, and pointing to licensed TDM services already adopted by Columbia, the University of Washington, the University of Chicago, Brown and Oxford.
  • The Office was not persuaded: "the evidence AAP provides relates only to a small subset of the works used for TDM research", researchers "would not have access to the full array of works currently covered by the exemption in the absence of renewal", and "these developments do not show that the prior rulemaking record no longer reliably supports renewal".
  • This is the formal Federal Register publication of the recommendation covered in yesterday's edition; nothing is final until the Librarian of Congress adopts the Register's recommendation, and the comment rounds run into March 2027.
CopyrightUS Federal Policy

Wednesday, 28 October 2026

Copyright Office rejects publishers' generative-AI objection and will recommend renewing the text-and-data-mining exemption

Federal Register
  • In the tenth triennial DMCA section 1201 rulemaking, published 28 October under Docket No. 2026-4, the Copyright Office "announces the Register's intention to recommend all but one of the existing exemptions for renewal". The Association of American Publishers opposed renewing the exemption for text and data mining of literary works, arguing that "concerns that unprotected corpora created under the exemption will be siphoned off to train generative [artificial intelligence (']AI[')] models" have been heightened.
  • The Register rejected that argument on the evidence: "AAP does not identify any instances of the security measures protecting a corpus compiled under the exemption being breached or a corpus being used for training generative AI. This serious but unsubstantiated possibility therefore does not provide a basis for the Register to refuse to recommend renewing the exemption." The exemption requires nonprofit research institutions to implement "effective security measures" and to limit corpus access to their own researchers.
  • This is a stated intention, not a final rule. Three rounds of comment follow — proponents by 7 December 2026, opponents by 22 February 2027 and replies by 22 March 2027, capped at twenty-five pages per class — and the document also sets out ten newly proposed classes including jailbreaking and repair of computer programs. The Register's finding is about breaches of exemption corpora specifically, not about AI training from other sources.
CopyrightUS Federal PolicyOpen Weights

Monday, 26 October 2026

Elvis Presley's rightsholders sue Anthropic over 274 songs, seeking up to $150,000 for each

NBC News·NME·The Hollywood Reporter
  • In a lawsuit filed on Friday 23 October, Authentic Brands Group — "the licensing platform that controls Presley's intellectual property" — along with other companies, trusts and individuals who own rights to his music, "accused Anthropic of infringing copyrights to 274 songs without any license or payment", NBC News reports. The songs named include "All Shook Up", "Can't Help Falling in Love", "Don't Be Cruel", "A Little Less Conversation" and "Return to Sender". NME reports the plaintiffs are "seeking statutory damages of up to $150,000 (£112,000) for each of the 274 songs, amounting to approximately $41.1million (£31million)".
  • The complaint alleges the infringement "has occurred throughout 'the entire development' of Anthropic's flagship Claude models and continues today as users generate outputs that reproduce copyrighted lyrics or create unauthorized adaptations of the songs", and describes Anthropic as having "built its entire business model on infringing copyrights at an unfathomable scale". On guardrails, The Hollywood Reporter quotes the filing saying that asked recently to recreate specific songs "for a modern audience", Claude did so and admitted: "These renders keep landing very close to the originals: same structure, same hooks reused with light rewording, and full sets of verses/choruses/bridges."
  • A spokesperson for Anthropic told NBC News: "We disagree with the claims and intend to defend this case fully." These are allegations in a complaint and no court has ruled. NBC News notes Anthropic agreed last year to a $1.5 billion settlement with authors over pirated books, "the largest settlement in the history of American copyright cases", and The Hollywood Reporter lists earlier music suits against the company from Round Hill, Universal Music Publishing, Abcko, Concord and BMG. We did not read the complaint itself; the figures above are from the three reports.
AnthropicCopyrightUS Federal Policy

Thursday, 22 October 2026

Judge hears cross-motions on fair use in music publishers' lyrics case against Anthropic

Courthouse News Service·The Epoch Times·Lawyer Monthly
  • US District Judge Eumi Lee heard cross-motions for summary judgment, plus Daubert motions, in San Jose on 21 October in the 2023 case brought by Concord Music Group, Capitol CMG, Universal Music, Songs of Universal, Polygram Publishing and Abkco Music. Damages sought are up to $150,000 for each of 499 allegedly infringed songs.
  • Plaintiffs' attorney Matthew Oppenheim argued Claude reproduces copyrighted lyrics, sometimes verbatim, saying "It couldn't do it if it didn't have the lyrics in the database," and, asked whether the publishers' position would hand them a monopoly over lyrics, answered "Copyright is a monopoly by nature." Anthropic attorney Sonal Mehta argued the company has only secondary liability because users supply the prompts, that the synthetic songs are new copyrightable material, and that "There isn't anything in the record that shows doom for the music industry."
  • Lawyer Monthly reports the publishers pointed to evidence concerning "almost 120,000 prompts used to generate synthetic lyrics," and that Judge Lee's questioning focused on whether Anthropic's use could damage existing or potential markets for the copyrighted material. The Epoch Times reports Mehta said there was no evidence Claude was designed to output copyrighted lyrics and that a Google search turns up the same lyrics, while the publishers countered that most guardrails were added only after they sued.
  • The reports differ on what happens next and both should be read with that in mind: Courthouse News says Judge Lee "took the summary judgment motions under submission and did not indicate her views," while The Epoch Times says the parties did not get through all their motions and that Lee asked them to consider continuing the hearing in late October or early November. No ruling has issued.
CopyrightAnthropicUS Federal Policy

Tuesday, 20 October 2026

Canada's largest news publishers sue Anthropic in Ontario over training Claude on their content Update

The Canadian Press / CP24·MobileSyrup
  • Postmedia, Torstar, The Globe and Mail and The Canadian Press filed a copyright claim against Anthropic in an Ontario court on 6 October; the Canadian Press wire report ran on 19 October. The statement of claim says Anthropic "has capitalized on the commercial success of its AI models… all without obtaining a valid licence from any of the News Media Companies".
  • The claim alleges Anthropic breached the publishers' website terms of service and circumvented technological protection measures restricting copying, and that it "deliberately 'scrapes' (i.e. accesses and copies) enormous amounts of text data from the internet and from the Plaintiffs' Websites", including on an ongoing basis in response to user prompts.
  • The same companies, with CBC/Radio-Canada, sued OpenAI in 2024; that case has not been resolved. This is the second front in Canada against a frontier lab over training data, and it lands weeks before Anthropic's expected IPO.
  • Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment and the allegations have not been proven in court. We could not confirm the statutory-damages figure circulating in secondary coverage and have left it out.
CopyrightAnthropicCanada

Sunday, 18 October 2026

Meta deletes the word "train" from the web-crawling clause of commercial terms taking effect 30 October mixedCompany claim

TechCrunch·Unite.AI·Nieman Lab
  • Unite.AI compares the clause archived on 16 October — "Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products" — with the revised text, in which the purpose clause now reads "to provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products." The verb "train" no longer appears. The terms still take effect on 30 October 2026.
  • Nieman Lab reported on 15 October that the original terms authorised Meta to use "automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials" against domains "associated with your products or services," and that three legal experts it consulted said the language could be used to argue Meta may scrape news sites and train on the content. Attorney Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy called it "a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market."
  • TechCrunch quotes Meta: "We've heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we've clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers." TechCrunch credits The Verge with first reporting the removal.
  • Meta's position is that nothing about its crawling behaviour changed, only the wording — a claim no one outside the company has verified. Nieman Lab says Meta declined to answer whether the "test credentials" would bypass paywalls.
MetaCopyrightUS Federal Policy

Saturday, 17 October 2026

Unsealed filing says Microsoft told staff to keep the OpenAI crawler project codenamed Project Mango secret Single sourceUpdate

Bloomberg Law
  • Bloomberg Law reports that a court document unsealed on Friday says Microsoft ordered employees to keep secret a website-scraping project that harvested AI training data for OpenAI. In the effort codenamed Project Mango, the publishers' partly unsealed motion for summary judgment says OpenAI paid Microsoft to develop and operate a crawler to copy webpage content, which was then used to train models including GPT-4o.
  • That data allegedly included copies of more than 160,000 of the publishers' works. How much OpenAI paid Microsoft and the number of webpages scraped remain under seal, as do how many training licensing deals the companies struck and how much they paid.
  • The filing says the publishers, including the New York Times, estimate ChatGPT fields 47 million prompts a day seeking news content, derived by applying an OpenAI expert witness's figure of 1.88% of all ChatGPT messages in July 2025 seeking news to the 2.5 billion prompts a day the chatbot receives. The document also discloses that OpenAI gave Microsoft its full set of GPT-3 training data as part of self-described horse trading.
  • The case is In Re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, S.D.N.Y. No. 1:25-md-03143, with the motion partially unsealed 10/16/26. These are the plaintiffs' submissions on cross motions for summary judgment, not court findings; Microsoft had argued for continued redaction and withdrew some requests on 9 October. Bloomberg Industry Group, which operates Bloomberg Law, has moved to intervene to oppose the sealing.
OpenAIMicrosoftCopyrightUS Federal Policy

Friday, 16 October 2026

Judge Stein stays the Times Publishing action in the OpenAI copyright MDL pending summary judgment

CourtListener·CourtListener
  • Per the docket in In re OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation (1:25-md-03143-SHS-OTW, S.D.N.Y.), on 15 October 2026 Judge Sidney H. Stein signed a joint stipulation and order staying all proceedings and deadlines in the Times Publishing Company action pending resolution of summary judgment motions in the other active cases in the MDL, with a joint status report due within 30 days of those rulings.
  • A separate order signed the same day directs plaintiffs in case 1:26-cv-08892-SHS to show cause in writing on or before 30 October 2026 why that action should not also be stayed pending the same summary judgment motions, with any defendants' response due 6 November 2026.
  • Also on 15 October, The New York Times Company, The Center for Investigative Reporting, Daily News LP, Ziff Davis and The Intercept Media filed a notice regarding sealing challenges to ECF No. 2083.
  • The orders are procedural: they concentrate the MDL on summary judgment in the lead cases rather than deciding any copyright question. Nothing in them indicates how the court will rule.
CopyrightOpenAIUS Federal Policy

Meta commercial terms effective 30 October let it crawl business accounts' own websites to train AI, lawyers say harmfulSingle source

Nieman Lab
  • Nieman Lab reports Meta's new commercial terms of use, effective 30 October, let Meta use "web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents" and "create test credentials" to access and crawl domains and URLs "associated with your products or services", and to use that content to "provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products".
  • Three legal experts who reviewed the terms at Nieman Lab's request said they could be used to argue Meta can scrape news sites to train AI products. Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy said: "This is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market."
  • Cornell's James Grimmelmann said the "test credentials" language would technically allow Meta to sign up as a fake user to bypass registration walls, and that publishers "either have to trust that Meta doesn't mean the full extent of what these terms say, or they have to stop [using business accounts]". There is no opt-out for business accounts ahead of 30 October.
  • A Meta spokesperson told Nieman Lab the crawling language was previously scattered across different terms and this update consolidates it, that the terms will not change how Meta crawls publishers in future, and that "content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt." Meta declined to say whether test credentials would bypass paywalls.
MetaCopyrightPrivacy

Wednesday, 14 October 2026

Judge grants Apple expedited access to OpenAI interview records and three depositions in its trade-secrets suit

TechCrunch·9to5Mac
  • U.S. District Judge Edward Davila ruled Apple may view documents from OpenAI's interviews with former Apple employees who applied to its consumer hardware and robotics groups, including interview checklists, guides, instructions, manuals, scripts, technical presentations and records referencing Apple technology or components. The court gave OpenAI five days to turn over materials already collected and 14 days for other materials related to the request.
  • Davila also allowed access to private LINE messages between named individuals including OpenAI employees Chang Liu and Alyssa Peng, and approved depositions of Liu, Peng and OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Yew Tan — all three former Apple employees.
  • Expedited discovery before the usual schedule is an unusual order, and it reaches into how one frontier lab interviews a rival's staff.
  • The judge denied expedited access to OpenAI R&D in areas such as metal finishes and power management, and denied broader discovery requests including OpenAI's hardware research, while leaving the door open for narrowed requests. Apple filed the suit in July. This is a discovery ruling, not a finding on the merits.
OpenAIAppleUS Federal PolicyCopyright

Tuesday, 13 October 2026

Character.ai files Chapter 11 in Delaware with Disney as $20m stalking-horse bidder for an IP licence mixed

Character.ai·Character.ai·Bloomberg Law
  • Character Technologies has commenced a voluntary Chapter 11 case in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware to facilitate a sale of "all or substantially all of its assets," and intends to keep operating the platform during the process. Before filing, it agreed that Disney Worldwide Services will serve as stalking-horse bidder "for a non-exclusive perpetual license of certain Company intellectual property and certain Company claims, in exchange for $20 million and Disney's provision of transition services using former Company employees it has hired."
  • The transaction is subject to higher or better offers under section 363, so $20 million is a floor. The company expects the sale process to close "in late November or early December 2026," and says that if it does not produce a purchase providing for continuation of the platform, "the platform will be wound down."
  • Chief executive Colin Adams said the company "has taken meaningful steps to sustain and improve its business in the face of significant legal, regulatory, and operational headwinds" and that the board judged a court-supervised sale the best way to maximise value. For now the platform runs, paid subscriptions remain active and billing is unchanged, and users can delete accounts or export data.
  • The court has not yet approved bidding procedures, and the filing does not state what the business is worth. The company's blog post does not mention Disney or the $20 million; those terms appear in the press release and in Bloomberg Law's account of it. Advisers are Wilson Sonsini, Areté Partners and Houlihan Lokey, with Skadden Arps for Disney.
IncidentsChild SafetyCopyright

Saturday, 10 October 2026

Arizona federal judge dismisses an AI-drafted complaint and bars the plaintiff from using AI to refile Single source

Fox News
  • US District Judge Krissa M. Lanham dismissed Shelly George's lawsuit against Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Thursday, October 8, writing that "the complaint appears to have been generated by artificial intelligence ('AI') as it resembles other AI-generated complaints the court has encountered".
  • Lanham wrote that "the complaint is not 'a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief'", and that "it is not the job of the district courts to make sense of the pleading, to supply facts to support the claim, or to imagine the claims that might fit the facts". The filing was treated as what is known as a "shotgun pleading" — factual allegations not connected to the actual claims.
  • Lanham permitted George to file an amended complaint but stipulated that "it must be less than 25-pages long and George will not be allowed to use AI to draft it" — a condition on a litigant's tooling rather than a sanction for false citations.
  • The order was issued on October 8 and reported on October 9. This reaches the briefing through a single outlet's account quoting the order; the docket itself was not opened, and no sanction or fee award is reported.
CopyrightUS Federal PolicyIncidents

Friday, 9 October 2026

114 lawmakers ask Google and Spirit Airlines to halt a $10 million deal for 100 million employee emails Single source

The Record
  • The Record reports that more than 100 members of Congress wrote on Thursday to the chief executives of Google and Spirit Airlines asking them to halt a deal under which Google would receive internal Spirit data in exchange for a $10 million payment to the failed carrier. The letter itself cites 114 federal lawmakers, and was led by Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
  • The proposed data includes about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employment contracts, employee and timecard records, and payroll and tax information. Google wants the data to train AI models and says it will be deidentified.
  • The lawmakers argue standard de-identification may not protect employee privacy given modern AI, writing that "Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous." They ask the companies to involve former employees in designing the deidentification, exclude as much employee information as possible, limit permitted uses and commission an independent confidentiality review. Almost 1,000 people lost their jobs at Spirit in Las Vegas after the airline announced in May it would shut down.
  • A Google spokesperson told The Record the company is not looking to buy personal information and that the data will either be fully excluded or deidentified by an independent third party before Google receives it. Spirit is defunct and The Record could not locate a press contact. The letter is a request, not a legal bar on the transaction.
PrivacyUS Federal PolicyLaborCopyright

USA TODAY and 13 affiliates sue OpenAI in Manhattan over 19 newspapers, asking the court to destroy its models

Court complaint (S.D.N.Y.)·ChatGPT Is Eating the World
  • The complaint is stamped "Case 1:26-cv-08892 Document 1 Filed 10/08/26 Page 1 of 79" in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, with a jury trial demanded. Plaintiffs are USA TODAY Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities, all owned by USA TODAY Co., including Gannett Satellite Information Network, The Courier-Journal, Detroit Free Press, Journal Sentinel and Phoenix Newspapers. Seven OpenAI entities are named as defendants.
  • Paragraph 2 states the plaintiffs "own copyrights in content published by 19 different publications", listing USA TODAY, The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Bergen Record, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Arizona Republic, The Palm Beach Post and others. Paragraph 4 alleges OpenAI's models "were trained on copyrighted material scraped from the internet without authorization—regardless of paywalls or other access restrictions".
  • Three counts are pleaded: copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, vicarious copyright infringement, and removal of copyright management information under the DMCA. The prayer for relief asks for an order "Ordering destruction under 17 U.S.C. § 503(b) of all GPT or other LLM models and training sets that incorporate the USA TODAY Plaintiffs' content".
  • The complaint quotes Sam Altman's testimony to the British House of Lords that "it would be impossible to train today's leading AI models without using copyrighted materials". The tracker that posted the complaint puts the running US total at 148 copyright suits against AI companies. OpenAI has not yet answered, and no damages figure appears in the paragraphs this briefing read.
CopyrightOpenAIUS Federal Policy

Thursday, 8 October 2026

Association for Human Mathematics urges mathematicians to discontinue work with OpenAI over its manuscript release mixedUpdate

Association for Human Mathematics (via Terence Tao's blog)·Inside AI News
  • The AHM's Communications Working Group published a statement dated 7 October, reposted as a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, responding to OpenAI's 6 October release of 722 manuscripts in 372 groups of results produced by an unreleased internal model. It says "Mathematicians did not ask for this work to be done" and "Releasing over 700 files at once is not a demonstration of scholarship, but a demonstration of power", and concludes "We urge mathematicians to discontinue their work with OpenAI".
  • The statement disputes OpenAI's claim to legitimacy, naming "The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, from whom OpenAI has claimed to derive its legitimacy", and notes OpenAI is "currently defending lawsuits against accusations of illegal plagiarism, copyright infringement, and trademark dilution".
  • This is an update to the release covered in yesterday's edition, and it escalates the dispute from methodology to non-cooperation: a professional body asking its members to stop working with a frontier lab.
  • The statement carries no signatory count and is attributed only to a working group; Inside AI News reports AHM has 752 members, so this is not a vote of the discipline. Inside AI News says OpenAI had not publicly responded as of publication, and the AHM's own statements page could not be cited directly because it is an index page.
Mathematicians vs the labsOpenAIAI For ScienceCopyrightLabor

Wednesday, 7 October 2026

North Carolina musician sentenced to 18 months for a $10 million streaming fraud using AI-generated songs harmful

BleepingComputer·Forbes
  • Michael Smith, 54, of North Carolina was sentenced on Tuesday to 18 months in prison and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64, with a further two years of supervised release, both outlets report. BleepingComputer says he collected "more than $10 million in royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music". He pleaded guilty in March, after a September 2024 indictment covering conduct between 2017 and 2024. Forbes reports prosecutors called it the first criminal case involving AI-music streaming fraud.
  • Forbes, quoting the prosecutors' release, says Smith used "as many as 10,000 Bot Accounts" created with fake email ids and "fraudulently obtained debit cards", and used AI to create "hundreds of thousands" of songs, streamed "billions of times". BleepingComputer reports a lower peak figure of "more than 1,000 bot accounts", and adds from court documents that a 20 October 2017 email Smith sent himself set out 52 cloud service accounts with 20 bot accounts each, roughly 661,440 streams per day and annual earnings exceeding $1.2 million at an average royalty rate of half a cent per stream.
  • Prosecutors measured the scheme against a real catalogue, and the two accounts agree on Smith's side of the comparison but not on Taylor Swift's. Both report 80.9 million family-plan streams of Smith's AI-generated music on YouTube Music in April 2023; BleepingComputer quotes the Justice Department putting Swift's entire catalogue at "9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plan streams" that month, while Forbes reports "3 million streams". Readers should treat the Swift figure as unresolved.
  • No Justice Department press release for the sentencing could be opened for this edition, so every figure above is as the two outlets render that release and the court documents. The bot-account count and the Swift comparison differ between them. The AI music company whose chief executive is referenced in the court documents is not named.
Scams FraudIncidentsCopyright

US Copyright Office opens an inquiry into music streaming fraud, citing AI-generated songs as a catalyst

Federal Register
  • The United States Copyright Office published a notice of inquiry, Docket No. 2026-6, on 7 October 2026 saying it is "soliciting information from the public regarding issues related to music streaming fraud", "Pursuant to a congressional request". Written comments are due by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on 23 November 2026, and reply comments by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on 21 December 2026. The Office says the inquiry responds to a letter from Representative Scott Fitzgerald dated 21 May 2026.
  • The notice ties the inquiry directly to AI-generated music, noting of the case against Michael Smith that "the hundreds of thousands of songs that the defendant uploaded were created with artificial intelligence". It quotes the congressional request as saying "there is nothing inherently wrong with using AI as a creative tool in music development, or the organic growth of AI-generated music", but that "generative AI can serve as a catalyst for criminals to perpetrate streaming fraud", especially as fraud scales with the number of songs involved. Subject of inquiry No. 4 asks what data exists on the relationship of streaming fraud to "the effects of AI-generated [music]".
  • The notice sets the market context in which it is asking: it cites a Digital Media Association estimate that streaming is "now driving around 70% of global sales", sound-recording streaming revenues of "approximately $9.5 billion domestically and $22 billion globally", and total music-publishing revenue of "approximately $7.3 billion domestically and $10 billion globally". It arrives the day after Smith was sentenced, and gives the federal copyright regulator a formal record on which a rule or a legislative recommendation could later rest.
  • This is a request for comment, not a rule: the Office proposes no standard, obligation or enforcement action in the notice, and names no deadline for its own report. The Federal Register HTML page redirects to an anti-scraping gate, so the text above was read from the government's raw-text version of the same document.
US Federal PolicyCopyrightScams Fraud

Tuesday, 6 October 2026

Nieman Lab documents more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures ChatGPT puts on AI-generated cartoons harmfulSingle source

Nieman Lab
  • Nieman Lab's Andrew Deck reports: "In all, I documented more than 15 New Yorker cartoonists whose signatures have been used by OpenAI's image generator without permission or compensation," naming Brendan Loper, Harry Bliss, Emily Flake, Joe Dator, Pat Byrnes, Peter Vey, Jason Adam Katzenstein, George Booth, Liza Donnelly, Ellis Rosen and Saul Steinberg among them. One ChatGPT cartoon signed "BLOPER" and circulated after the deaths of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry drew 25,000 likes on a single tweet.
  • An OpenAI spokesperson said: "We very much appreciate the community flagging bugs and unintended behavior by our models, so we can address them." After Nieman Lab notified OpenAI, ChatGPT began returning "This prompt may violate our guardrails concerning similarity to third-party content" — but Deck reports that as of publication "it continues to sign some of the generic cartoons it generates with the names of real New Yorker cartoonists".
  • Condé Nast signed a multi-year licensing deal with OpenAI in 2024, but a New Yorker spokesperson told Nieman Lab the company has never granted an LLM developer permission to train models on its cartoons, and that reproducing the magazine's logo is not allowed under any of its LLM deals. OpenAI declined to answer how its models ingested the signatures. Loper told Nieman Lab: "My name is my name. It felt very much like a violation of my personhood."
OpenAICopyrightIncidents

Wednesday, 30 September 2026

Third Circuit affirms against Ross Intelligence in the first US appeals court ruling on AI training and copyright

Reuters·MediaPost
  • Reuters reports the Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday for Thomson Reuters, rejecting "Ross' argument that its search engine made fair use of material from Thomson Reuters' Westlaw platform" — "the first copyright dispute over AI training to be heard by a US appeals court". MediaPost reports the decision came from "a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals" and that the opinion "is temporarily sealed".
  • The material at issue was Westlaw "headnotes" — summaries of key points in judicial opinions — which Ross used to train its legal research service. Reuters quotes the district court's reasoning, which the appeals court upheld: "Ross took the headnotes to make it easier to develop a competing legal research tool. So Ross's use is not transformative." Thomson Reuters said it was "pleased with the ruling" and that "respecting copyright is essential for fostering innovation while protecting intellectual property".
  • MediaPost notes the suit was filed in 2020 and that the district court ruled against Ross in February 2025, and that Disney and other studios argued in support of Thomson Reuters that a Ross win would "chill incentives to continue investing in and creating the movies and television shows that delight audiences worldwide and fuel the engine of the American entertainment industry".
  • Both outlets stress the limit: Ross built a non-generative legal search tool that competed directly with the source of its training data, so the ruling does not settle the pending generative-AI cases. And because the panel's opinion is sealed, its actual reasoning is not yet public — the quoted reasoning is the district court's. Ross did not immediately respond to Reuters.
CopyrightUS Federal Policy

Tuesday, 29 September 2026

European Commission opens a targeted consultation on copyright-protected content used in AI, closing 3 November Single source

European Commission
  • The Commission says it is "gathering feedback on challenges and options for potential future measures to support the impact of technology, including artificial intelligence, on the effective copyright protection". The consultation covers four areas: the use of copyright-protected content in artificial intelligence; the fight against online piracy of content such as live events; the single equitable remuneration right of music performers and producers; and copyright of scientific research.
  • Feedback is invited from rights holders, generative AI providers and other actors in the AI value chain, intermediaries, collective management organisations, live-event organisers, research organisations, national authorities, consumer organisations and NGOs. The Commission says the consultation "remains open until 3 November 2026" and builds on a call for evidence conducted earlier this year.
  • A consultation is not a proposal: the Commission has committed to no measure and set no date for one. This is the EU's first formal step since the AI Act's general-purpose model obligations towards deciding whether training on copyrighted works needs a new remuneration rule.
EU AI ActCopyrightUS Federal Policy

Saturday, 19 September 2026

Universal and Sony sue Suno a second time, asserting 60,202 recordings against its v6 models

US District Court, D. Mass. (complaint)·Engadget
  • The 45-page complaint, filed on 09/18/26 in the District of Massachusetts as Case No. 1:26-cv-14275 by UMG Recordings and Capitol Records with Sony Music Entertainment and nine affiliates, calls itself "the second action brought by two record companies and their affiliates" over recordings Suno copied without permission to train its models.
  • The labels assert 60,202 sound recordings, which the complaint says "may more closely reflect the breadth of Suno's infringement" but "remain only a small portion" of the works infringed, and allege Suno obtained many of them by "unlawfully 'stream ripping' them from YouTube in circumvention of the technological measures" designed to prevent such access.
  • The prayer for relief seeks statutory damages under 17 U.S.C. § 504(c) "in an amount up to $150,000 per work infringed" and DMCA damages under § 1203(c)(3)(A) "up to $2,500 with respect to each act of circumvention". Engadget puts the resulting exposure at up to $9 billion, which is the outlet's own arithmetic and not a figure in the complaint.
  • The complaint cites Deezer reporting in July 2026 that AI-generated tracks exceeded half of all daily new music deliveries to its platform, "roughly 90,000 machine-made tracks uploaded every day". Engadget reports the suit targets Suno's v6 models, released with Warner Music Group and BMG, and quotes Suno saying the claims "remain fundamentally flawed on both the facts and the law".
CopyrightIncidents

Friday, 18 September 2026

Unsealed NYT filing: Microsoft director called AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history"

TechCrunch·404 Media
  • Newly unredacted material from The New York Times' summary-judgment brief against OpenAI and Microsoft quotes a January 2023 internal memo by Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, calling the practice "an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions" and "the largest theft of labor in human history".
  • The filing says Microsoft's own data shows its Copilot "answer engine" cut click-through rates for The New York Times' domain by as much as 93% compared with traditional Bing search, described in a January 2024 Microsoft presentation as a "doom loop" that would "hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time".
  • On scale, the filing states OpenAI's mid-training datasets "contain more than 91,692 copies of works published by the NYT, Daily News, and Center for Investigative Reporting", that a Common Crawl-derived dataset included "more than 2 million documents from nytimes.com alone", and that a dataset assembled under "Project Mango" contains copies of at least 160,903 unique works. It quotes OpenAI's Nick Ryder describing "a hack to get around nytimes paywall", to which Greg Brockman replied "ah nice".
  • TechCrunch notes that much of the material comes from the Times' own brief rather than the underlying exhibits, which remain sealed, and that the quotes are presented without their original context. These are the plaintiff's characterisations; OpenAI and Microsoft did not return requests for comment.
OpenAIMicrosoftCopyrightUS Federal Policy

RAND: most insurers are silent on AI liability, and Verisk/ISO has issued optional generative-AI exclusions Single source

The Register·RAND
  • The Register reported on 18 September on "The Insurability of Artificial Intelligence", a RAND report by Sasha Romanosky and Celine Robinson, which describes a market split three ways: a minority of carriers affirmatively covering AI losses, a growing number filing broad exclusions, and a majority staying silent.
  • In January 2026, Verisk/ISO — "whose standardized forms appear in more than 80 percent of US property and casualty policies" — introduced optional language carriers can adopt to exclude bodily injury, property damage and other harms arising from generative AI. W. R. Berkley has introduced exclusions in directors and officers, errors and omissions, and fiduciary liability products.
  • The Register cites the AI Incident Database listing 713 incidents drawn from more than 6,000 reports, including 586 classed as misinformation or manipulation, 346 as deepfakes or synthetic media and 58 as privacy or data leaks, alongside "the 250 or so US lawsuits related to AI, largely related to copyright and IP".
  • Silence is not the same as coverage: the report's point is that when a claim arrives, an unstated position is resolved in litigation rather than in the policy. Only The Register has covered the report so far.
US Federal PolicyIncidentsCopyright

Thursday, 17 September 2026

Ninth Circuit affirms dismissal of DMCA claims over Copilot and Codex: the tools create new works, not stripped copies

Ninth Circuit
  • In Doe v. GitHub, No. 24-7700 (D.C. No. 4:22-cv-06823-JST), filed 16 September 2026, the panel affirmed dismissal of claims under 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b). The court held that plaintiffs had Article III standing "because they plausibly alleged a substantial risk of injury", but did not state a claim, because Copilot and Codex "do not remove or alter copyright management information (CMI) from a copy of an existing protected work but instead create new works that never contained that information".
  • The opinion says plaintiffs' "own allegations about Copilot show that it is best understood as learning from existing works and then creating new works based on that learning process, not as making copies of existing works", and distinguishes a search engine, which returns copies of material that already exists: "If Copilot functioned like a search engine and produced [results that] contain CMI, then plaintiffs might have a stronger claim that Copilot had removed their CMI. But that is not what plaintiffs have alleged."
  • The panel declined to adopt the "identicality" framing the district court and defendants used, writing that "the DMCA does not require literal identicality" and that the concept is "best understood as a gloss on the [statutory text rather than] an independent (and atextual) element of a section 1202(b) claim". It closed by comparing 17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3), "permitting up to $25,000 per violation", with § 504(c)(1), "capping traditional copyright statutory damages at $30,000 per work", and declining to convert "run-of-the-mill copyright-infringement claims into DMCA claims".
  • The appeal was interlocutory under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b), argued 11 February 2026; the opinion is by Judge Eric D. Miller, joined by Judge Sidney R. Thomas and District Judge Stanley Blumenfeld, Jr., sitting by designation. The court "express[ed] no view" on whether substantial similarity would support an ordinary copyright infringement claim, so this decision closes the DMCA theory, not copyright litigation against the tools.
CopyrightOpenAIMicrosoftUS Federal Policy