Technology, AI, and digital law cases
A California federal court held that video creators plausibly alleged standing and a DMCA anti-circumvention claim based on ByteDance’s alleged bypass of YouTube safeguards to collect AI training data.
The Third Circuit held that Westlaw headnotes are copyrightable and that a competing AI legal-research company did not fairly use them as training material.
The D.C. Circuit upheld the Department of War’s exclusion of Claude from its supply chain, rejecting statutory, due-process, and First Amendment challenges.
A federal court dismissed part of an author’s AI copyright claim because generalized allegations about shadow libraries did not plausibly connect her books to the Nemotron training data.
A federal judge acquitted a former Google engineer on economic-espionage counts because the trial evidence did not prove he intended his trade-secret theft to benefit the Chinese government when it occurred.
The Ninth Circuit vacated an injunction because Amazon was unlikely to prove that Perplexity itself accessed Amazon computers when users directed its AI assistant.
A federal court approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion copyright class settlement, finding its per-work relief, notice, claims process, and limited release fair and adequate.
Apple filed a blockbuster trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI, io Products, and two former senior Apple engineers, alleging OpenAI systematically recruited Apple employees to steal confidential hardware engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain secrets for its AI device program.
Europe’s highest court dismissed Google’s final appeal on July 2, 2026, confirming the €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine — the largest upheld competition penalty in EU history — and opening the door for private damages suits by rivals harmed by Google’s pre-installation practices.
Ohio’s Fifth District Court of Appeals affirmed that Google Search is not a common carrier under Ohio common law, holding that a search engine’s curated results page is an editorial product, not the neutral transport of others’ content.
In a landmark AI liability ruling, the Regional Court of Munich held that Google bears direct liability for false statements generated by its AI Overviews feature, treating the AI-synthesized content as Google’s own speech rather than third-party material hosted by a search intermediary.
An Illinois federal court dismissed the trespass to chattels claim in a dispute over a browser extension that displays price comparison popups over e-commerce sites, continuing the long line of “website framing” cases.
Judge Timothy Brooks granted NetChoice’s preliminary-injunction motion against Arkansas Act 900, the General Assembly’s second attempt to regulate minors’ use of social media after the same court enjoined the predecessor Act 689 in 2025. Act 900’s addictive-practices ban, mandatory notification curfew, default privacy settings, and parental dashboard provisions all fall under First Amendment scrutiny.
A federal judge in Arizona granted a temporary restraining order preventing the state from prosecuting prediction market platform Kalshi under state gambling laws, finding the CFTC likely to succeed on federal preemption grounds.
Case: Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 25-cv-09514-MMC (N.D. Cal. Mar. 9, 2026) Court: U.S. District Court for
The Tenth Circuit held that investigative costs qualify as “loss” under the CFAA even without any technological harm to computer systems or data, expanding the statute’s reach into ordinary information-misappropriation disputes.
A Florida federal court denied most of Character.AI and Google’s motions to dismiss in a wrongful-death suit over a teenager’s interactions with an AI chatbot, allowing products-liability, negligence, FDUTPA, and aiding-and-abetting claims to proceed.
A Georgia trial court granted OpenAI summary judgment in a defamation suit over a ChatGPT hallucination, ruling that a reasonable user would not treat the chatbot’s output as a factual assertion in light of OpenAI’s hallucination warnings.