Copyright law cases
A Delaware federal court held that Ross Intelligence’s use of Westlaw headnotes to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use — the first major U.S. court decision to find that AI training on copyrighted material for a directly competing product is direct copyright infringement.
A California federal court allowed direct copyright claims over the dembow rhythm used in reggaeton songs by Bad Bunny, Drake, and other artists to proceed, while dismissing secondary-liability claims with leave to amend.
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6-3 that a copyright owner’s failure to know that a single registration application could not cover both published and unpublished works did not necessarily constitute a ‘knowing’ inaccuracy that voids the registration — allowing courts to overlook good-faith mistakes in copyright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.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that the equitable defense of laches cannot bar a copyright infringement claim for damages filed within the Copyright Act’s three-year statute of limitations.
The Federal Circuit reversed the district court and held that Oracle’s Java API declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of its API packages are entitled to copyright protection — reversing the landmark ruling that APIs were not copyrightable and remanding the fair use question that the Supreme Court ultimately resolved in Google’s favor in 2021.
The Supreme Court held 6-3 that the copyright first sale doctrine applies to copies manufactured abroad and first sold outside the United States — allowing parallel importation of foreign-made goods bearing copyrighted content without the copyright holder’s permission, and overruling the Ninth Circuit’s geographic limitation on the first sale doctrine.
The Federal Circuit held that Voter Verified’s copyright claim against Premier Election Solutions for voter verification software failed under the merger doctrine — finding that the specific expression in the claimed software code was inseparable from the underlying idea of a voter-verified paper audit trail system, and thus not independently copyrightable.
The Second Circuit reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment to YouTube, holding that the DMCA § 512(c) safe harbor does not protect a service provider that had actual knowledge or awareness of specific infringing material — and that willful blindness to pervasive infringement can disqualify a platform from safe harbor protection.
The Supreme Court held 6–2 that Congress acted within its Copyright Clause power when it restored copyright protection to millions of foreign works that had fallen into the public domain in the United States, and that doing so did not violate the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that the Copyright Act’s registration requirement is a claim-processing rule, not a jurisdictional prerequisite — meaning courts can hear copyright cases even when registration has not occurred, if neither party objects.
The Ninth Circuit held that the copyright first sale doctrine does not apply to foreign-made goods, allowing Omega to prevent Costco from reselling Omega watches in the United States without authorization — a ruling the Supreme Court affirmed by an equally divided 4-4 court in 2010, leaving the Ninth Circuit’s gray-market-unfriendly rule in place.
The Federal Circuit held that violation of an open-source software license condition — not merely a contractual covenant — constitutes copyright infringement, giving open-source licensors the full array of copyright remedies (including injunctions and statutory damages) rather than only contract damages when licensees violate the terms of free and open source licenses.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that Grokster could be liable for copyright infringement by inducing its users to infringe — adopting an inducement theory of secondary copyright liability and holding that a distributor who promotes infringing use through affirmative acts of encouragement can be held liable regardless of whether the technology has substantial non-infringing uses.
The Federal Circuit held that the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision does not create a new property right and requires proof that access was unauthorized; because Chamberlain implicitly authorized customers to use third-party transmitters, Skylink’s universal garage door opener did not violate § 1201(a)(2).
The Federal Circuit held that a shrink-wrap license contractually prohibiting reverse engineering of software is enforceable and not preempted by federal copyright law, even though copyright law itself permits reverse engineering in certain circumstances.
The Supreme Court held 7–2 that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which added 20 years to existing and future copyright terms, does not violate the Copyright Clause’s “limited Times” requirement or the First Amendment.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court’s injunction requiring Napster to block access to infringing content — holding that Napster’s peer-to-peer music file sharing service was liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and that the Sony Betamax staple article defense did not protect Napster’s business model.
The Ninth Circuit held that a flea market operator could be vicariously and contributorily liable for copyright infringement by vendors selling counterfeit recordings — establishing the framework for secondary copyright liability that would later be applied to online platforms and peer-to-peer services, and holding that financial benefit from infringement and ability to supervise infringing activity support vicarious liability.