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August 25, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — In an opinion that a split Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel said involved multiple questions of first impression regarding the application of the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a “thorny” question of appellate jurisdiction, the judge that wrote the majority opinion said that a section of the AWCPA does not reach copyrights in architectural plans as pictorial, graphic and sculptural works and could not support a Texas federal judge’s dismissal of an architectural firm’s architectural-work claims when the complaint did not establish that the challenged uses occurred after construction.
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August 24, 2026
ATLANTA — A Florida federal judge correctly denied attorney fees for YouTube LLC and related entities (collectively, YouTube) after the video streamer prevailed on copyright infringement claims by a film company that owns rights related to culturally significant Spanish language films, an 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held. The panel said that because the suit was not frivolous or unreasonable, fees were not permissible under the Copyright Act.
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August 21, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Firms that represented publishers’ interests and authors involved in a $1.5 billion class action settlement between a large group of authors and Anthropic PBC in a copyright suit over texts used to train Anthropic’s artificial intelligence programs have filed two notices of appeal, challenging only a portion of the final judgment that relates to more than $100 million in attorney fees awarded to the class counsel.
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August 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel determined that a music service failed to establish jurisdiction for its challenge to the Copyright Royalty Board’s interpretation of licensing requirements, leaving it up to a District of Columbia federal judge to determine “what weight, if any, to assign to the Royalty Board’s non-binding regulatory interpretation” in an underlying royalties dispute.
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August 19, 2026
NEW YORK — An independent music artist’s attempts to use a motion for reconsideration of a ruling dismissing one of his claims as a means to amend allegations in his artificial intelligence copyright action and comes too late to save the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act or common law claims, a federal judge in New York said in denying the motion.
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August 18, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — An expert in large language model (LLM) training and use easily passes the low bar for admissibility, and his reliance on an LLM for testing is not a reason to exclude his opinion that an artificial intelligence model memorizes authors’ styles and works, a proposed copyright class tells a federal judge in California in opposing the expert’s exclusion.
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August 17, 2026
NEW YORK — OpenAI entities defending consolidated copyright actions told a federal judge in New York on Aug. 14 that the news plaintiffs have built a request for sanctions for alleged discovery violations on routine discovery practices in heavily litigated cases and a mischaracterization of events.
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August 14, 2026
LAS VEGAS — A federal judge in Nevada determined that defendant travel agency defendants should see a jury’s $250,000 actual damages award against them doubled to $500,000 for willfully infringing a trademark on the phrase “Dirty Vibes” belonging to an adult entertainment company; the judge also determined that the defendants owe another half a million in disgorgement.
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August 12, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg must sit for a deposition in consolidated artificial intelligence copyright actions after a federal judge in California denied a motion to quash the apex deposition, according to an Aug. 11 docket entry.
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August 11, 2026
CHICAGO — A Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed an Illinois federal judge’s summary judgment against a plaintiff-appellant technology company, holding that there was no evidence on the record to support its claims that another entity misappropriated copyrighted source code for a coin-counting machine the plaintiff-appellant developed for a banking entity based in the United Kingdom.
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August 06, 2026
FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal judge in Texas dismissed with prejudice following a settlement a lawsuit alleging that a supplier of proppants used in hydraulic fracturing misappropriated trade secrets by accessing proprietary software that an information technology services company developed and managed for the supplier’s operations.
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August 04, 2026
NEW YORK — Reddit Inc. adequately alleges that both it and its users’ content are entitled to copyright protections and that Perplexity AI Inc. and SerpApi LLC evaded technical measures designed to protect that content, a federal judge in New York said while dismissing state law unfair competition and unjust enrichment claims as preempted.
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July 30, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A partially split Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on July 29 affirmed both attorney fees against plaintiff entities over their unsuccessful copyright and trademark claims in a dispute over fudge and affirmed their jury victory on trade secret claims, holding that there was enough evidence in the record for a jury to find that a fudge recipe derived economic value from remaining secret.
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July 30, 2026
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Anthropic PBC must preserve more than 500 million individual Claude prompts and outputs, with half of the randomly selected records coming from before Jan. 28, and the other 250 million from between that date and March 24, as well as any records from that time frame containing certain terms relevant to the copyright battle over artificial intelligence song lyrics, a federal judge in California said.
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July 29, 2026
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge denied an anonymous website operator’s motion to quash a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) subpoena seeking identifying information from an internet services company, finding that the copyright holder presented a concrete infringement claim and sought information necessary to identify and sue the operator.
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July 29, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in California granted final approval of a $1.5 billion class action settlement between authors and Anthropic PBC in a copyright suit over texts used to train Anthropic’s artificial intelligence programs; the judge held that the settlement was fair to the class members, providing “substantial benefits to the Class in light of the novel claims asserted.”
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July 29, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge granted a veteran radio journalist’s motion to send his suit against Google LLC and its parent back to state court; the judge agreed with the journalist’s argument that his suit that claims that one of Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) products mimicked the cadence of his voice focused on the use of his likeness, not the copying of copyrighted material and was thus not preempted by the Copyright Act.
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July 24, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed certain defendants related to the distiller of Tullamore D.E.W. Irish whiskey, holding that a songwriter who brought copyright claims based on alleged unpaid use of a song in advertisements for the whiskey failed to show that the distilling entities were subject to the court’s personal jurisdiction, despite their corporate relationship to a co-defendant that was not dismissed.
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July 24, 2026
NEW YORK — An artist who created a Styrofoam sculpture of a snake for an Italian adult film star and politician should have discovered the sculpture’s use in another artist’s works featuring the pornographic actress created in the late 1980s and early 1990s long before the filing of a 2021 suit, a Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel found, upholding a New York federal judge’s finding that the plaintiff-appellant’s claims were time-barred.
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July 23, 2026
LOS ANGELES — After Cox Commc'ns, Inc. v. Sony Music Ent., movie and television production companies’ contributory copyright infringement claim is doomed because there is no evidence that Midjourney Inc. displayed copyrighted material or encouraged users to produce it, the artificial intelligence image company says in a motion for partial judgment on the pleadings. Meanwhile, the parties wrapped briefing on Midjourney’s attempt to have a judge take a second look at a ruling limiting discovery into the plaintiffs’ consumer-facing AI uses.
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July 21, 2026
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — X Corp. and a group of music publishers stipulated to the dismissal with prejudice of copyright claims brought against X in a Tennessee federal court, bringing an end to the suit in which the publishers argued that the social media outlet was liable for contributory infringement based on infringing actions by its users.
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July 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated a nearly $12.7 million award to software entities by a judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, holding that the judge improperly used unforeseeable hindsight when assessing the value of a company’s copyrighted software that was infringed by the United States.
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July 17, 2026
LOS ANGELES — A federal judge in California granted an artificial intelligence study materials company summary judgment on direct and vicarious copyright, trade dress and trademark and other claims, finding that it was merely a passive entity with respect to its users’ uploading of copyrighted materials.
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July 16, 2026
NEW YORK — For two years, OpenAI entities misled plaintiffs and the court about the ability to search training data and ChatGPT outputs for plaintiffs’ copyrighted material and destroyed other evidence, the reality of which came to light only during a court-ordered second deposition of the defendants’ corporate representative, news plaintiffs say in asking the federal judge in New York overseeing multidistrict copyright litigation to impose sanctions.
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July 14, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — In a pair of opinions, a Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel upheld a North Carolina federal judge’s preliminary injunction against a Dutch software company accused of stealing a North Carolina software company’s branding, code and trade secrets because the Dutch entity targeted United States commercial conduct but vacated a civil contempt sanction against the Dutch company’s attorney because the plaintiff company failed to show that it was harmed by noncompliance with a court order.