Copyright law cases
The Sixth Circuit reversed summary judgment for George Clinton and his company Thang, holding that genuine disputes of material fact exist about whether the late P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell was a co-author and co-owner of the group’s sound recordings under copyright law.
A D.C. federal judge denied motions to dismiss copyright infringement claims brought by a jury consultant against three defense attorneys who downloaded her copyrighted jury-attitude report from a public court docket and filed it in support of their own clients’ January 6 venue-transfer motions without permission or payment.
A Central District of California judge denied motions to dismiss Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros.’ copyright claims against the makers of Hailuo AI, finding that the video-generation tool’s reproduction of iconic characters like Spider-Man and Darth Vader plausibly constitutes both direct and contributory infringement.
A federal judge enters a $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna’s Archive and orders global registries to disable the site’s remaining domains, marking the second massive judgment against the piracy operation in 2026.
The Third Circuit vacated the dismissal of a copyright infringement complaint against 54 foreign e-commerce defendants, holding the district court’s standing order failed to properly analyze personal jurisdiction under the purposeful availment test.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that EU member states may require platforms like Meta to compensate press publishers for use of their news content, validating national regulators’ authority to set fair remuneration criteria and impose penalties.
A Los Angeles federal jury found Ye (Kanye West) and his companies liable for approximately $438,000 in damages for using the copyrighted instrumental track ‘MSD PT2’ without authorization in an early demo of ‘Hurricane’ performed at the 2021 Donda album listening party at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
The Court of Justice of the EU ruled that member states may require online platforms to pay fair compensation to press publishers for use of news snippets, upholding Italian legislation implementing the DSM Copyright Directive.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in a Grand Chamber decision that online platforms like Meta must provide fair compensation to press publishers when displaying snippets or previews of news articles, clarifying the scope of the EU Copyright Directive (2019/790).
A federal judge dismissed a pro se plaintiff’s copyright infringement claim alleging Warner Bros. copied his screenplay for the Joker films, finding no plausible allegation of access and no substantial similarity between the works.
The Eleventh Circuit vacated summary judgment against Trunk Archive, holding that a photographer’s retention of narrow collaboration rights does not negate the exclusivity of a licensing agency’s rights under the Copyright Act.
A federal judge denied most of NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss a class action alleging the company trained AI models on pirated books, finding that dataset download scripts ‘have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement’ and that the Supreme Court’s Cox ruling does not shield NVIDIA from contributory liability.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that retransmitting satellite TV via internal cable to retirement home residents’ rooms does not constitute ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, denying GEMA’s claim for separate licensing fees.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that a retirement home’s retransmission of satellite television and radio broadcasts to residents’ rooms via internal cable does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, distinguishing permanent care home residents from transient hotel guests.
The CJEU held that a retirement home’s retransmission of satellite TV and radio signals to residents’ rooms via internal cable does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, because residents are not a ‘new public’ beyond the original broadcast audience.
A California federal court dismissed Brandy Melville’s Lanham Act and unfair competition claims against Shein, finding they were preempted by the Copyright Act because they merely recast copyright infringement allegations as trademark claims.
The UK High Court dismissed claims by the estates of Jimi Hendrix Experience members Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, ruling that their 1966 recording agreement unambiguously assigned copyright to the producers and that prior releases barred all claims, including those related to streaming.
The UK High Court ruled that the estates of Jimi Hendrix’s bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell have no copyright ownership or performers’ property rights in approximately 40 studio recordings, finding the 1966 Recording Agreement unambiguously assigned worldwide copyright to producers.
A Manhattan federal jury awarded $102 million to the Morgan Art Foundation after finding art dealer Michael McKenzie and American Image Art produced and sold thousands of unauthorized reproductions of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE artwork.
After prevailing in a $25.6 million copyright case over CoComelon character infringement, Moonbug sought $933K in additional fees. The court denied appellate fees — finding BabyBus’s curated appeal was objectively reasonable — but awarded $280K for extraordinary judgment enforcement work necessitated by BabyBus’s use of a shell entity to divert funds.
In a dispute over PrepMod, a COVID-19 vaccination scheduling platform, the court ruled that the developer’s copyright infringement counterclaim survives but statutory damages and attorney’s fees are barred under 17 U.S.C. § 412 because the infringement began two years before registration.
The Ninth Circuit ruled that a California federal judge applied local meet-and-confer rules too rigidly when denying a new trial motion in a willful copyright infringement case over the unauthorized DVD distribution of a Christian film.
After the Third Circuit vacated prior default judgments and remanded for reconsideration, the district court reinstated default judgment against Chinese companies selling counterfeit kitchen products, finding personal jurisdiction established through Amazon and AliExpress sales into the forum.
A federal judge in San Francisco denied Databricks’ motion to dismiss copyright infringement claims alleging the company used pirated books to train its MPT and DBRX large language models, finding the authors sufficiently tied their works to the AI models.
The Supreme Court left standing a Ninth Circuit ruling that Walmart was not directly liable for copyright infringement in product photographs uploaded by a third-party drop-ship vendor, declining to resolve a circuit split over the volitional conduct test for online platform copyright liability.
A Georgia federal court dismissed copyright infringement claims by the inventor of “key shadowing” quantum-resistant encryption technology against HyperSphere Technologies, the company to which he had assigned his patent, ruling he failed to adequately state a claim that his separately registered software code was infringed.
The Supreme Court unanimously reversed a billion-dollar verdict against Cox Communications and held that an internet service provider is contributorily liable for user copyright infringement only when it induces the infringement or sells a service tailored to infringement. Mere knowledge that subscribers are infringing is not enough.
The Eighth Circuit affirmed a $319,859 attorney’s fees award against a plaintiff who unsuccessfully claimed copyright infringement of a car dealership customer intake form, finding no abuse of discretion.
The CJEU Grand Chamber ruled that EU copyright’s ‘pastiche’ exception is not a catch-all defense but covers creations that use characteristic copyrighted elements to engage in recognizable artistic dialogue with existing works — a landmark holding for music sampling, remix culture, and AI-generated content across the EU.
In a landmark Grand Chamber ruling, the CJEU defined ‘pastiche’ as an autonomous concept in EU copyright law, holding that music sampling can be lawful where the new work establishes a recognizable artistic dialogue with the source material — with major implications for AI-generated content.
In the latest chapter of the 25-year Kraftwerk sampling dispute, the CJEU Grand Chamber held that the copyright ‘pastiche’ exception is not a catch-all but requires overt, recognizable artistic dialogue with the source work — with major implications for sampling, remix culture, and AI-generated content.
A federal judge entered a $322 million default judgment against the shadow library Anna’s Archive for scraping and distributing millions of copyrighted sound recordings from Spotify, calling it one of the most horrendous acts of piracy he had seen.
The Eleventh Circuit upheld DISH Network’s copyright infringement victory and $600,000 damages award against a Florida businessman who operated an unauthorized service retransmitting Arabic-language television channels.
A federal judge denied Meta’s motion to dismiss copyright claims alleging the company used BitTorrent to acquire copyrighted works for AI training, finding that the torrenting process necessarily involved uploading the works and enabling third-party infringement.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against celebrity fitness trainer Tracy Anderson, holding that the exercise sequences in her 19 fitness DVDs are functional routines — not expressive choreographic works — and therefore unprotectable under copyright law.
The Fifth Circuit held that U.S. statutory copyright termination and renewal recapture worldwide rights, not just U.S. territorial rights — breaking with decades of consensus and creating a circuit-level fault line in international copyright law.
A Northern District of California court granted Pinterest summary judgment under DMCA Section 512(c), holding that the safe harbor protects user-generated images embedded in email, in-app, and push notifications because the underlying files remain stored on Pinterest’s servers regardless of how they’re displayed.
Judge Stein dismissed Ziff Davis’s DMCA Section 1201 anti-circumvention claim against OpenAI, holding that a robots.txt file is not a technological measure that ‘effectively controls access’ to a copyrighted work and that ignoring it does not constitute circumvention.
A New York federal court dismissed Donald Trump’s $50 million copyright suit against Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster over The Trump Tapes audiobook, holding that interview recordings are unitary works authored by the recorder, not joint works.
The Paris Judicial Court issued France’s first major upcycling decision, holding that incorporating cut pieces of authentic Hermès silk scarves into Levi’s denim jackets — even when sold as commercial ‘upcycling’ — constitutes copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. The court rejected the argument that environmental sustainability operates as a defense to luxury IP rights.
Judge Stein largely denied Microsoft and OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the New York Times’s landmark copyright suit over GPT training, allowing contributory infringement, federal trademark dilution, and certain DMCA Section 1202(b)(1) CMI-removal claims to proceed.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that a copyright plaintiff who timely files under the discovery rule may recover damages for infringing acts occurring more than three years before filing, rejecting the argument that a separate three-year damages lookback window limits recovery.
The Supreme Court held 6-3 that a copyright owner’s failure to know that a single registration application could not cover both published and unpublished works did not necessarily constitute a ‘knowing’ inaccuracy that voids the registration — allowing courts to overlook good-faith mistakes in copyright registration applications under 17 U.S.C. § 411(b).
The Supreme Court held 5–4 that Georgia’s officially adopted annotated code — including annotations prepared under legislative supervision — is not copyrightable under the government edicts doctrine, because works created by government officials exercising legislative or judicial authority belong to the public.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress lacked constitutional authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity for copyright infringement under the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, leaving rights holders without a federal damages remedy when states infringe their copyrights.
The Supreme Court held that the Copyright Act’s authorization of “full costs” under § 505 covers only the six categories of costs specified in the general federal costs statute — not additional litigation expenses like expert witnesses, e-discovery, and jury consultants.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that copyright registration “occurs” when the Copyright Office registers a claim — not when the applicant files — meaning copyright holders must wait for the Office to act before they can sue for infringement.
The Supreme Court held 6–2 that surface designs on cheerleading uniforms are copyrightable, establishing a new two-part separability test: a design element is protectable if it can be perceived as a work of art separate from the useful article, and would qualify for copyright protection if imagined independently.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that courts awarding attorney fees under the Copyright Act must give substantial weight to the objective reasonableness of the losing party’s litigation position, while retaining discretion to weigh all other relevant factors.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that Aereo’s service — which captured over-the-air broadcasts using thousands of tiny antennas and streamed them to individual subscribers — performed copyrighted works publicly and infringed broadcasters’ exclusive public performance right.