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October 22, 2026
LOS ANGELES — A federal magistrate judge in California dismissed a copyright lawsuit after the digital creator behind the popular internet meme “Running Away Balloon” art and an artificial intelligence marketing company that allegedly infringed on the copyright by making the two-box comic available on its site resolved the case.
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October 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an Oct. 19 order list, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a videographer’s petition for a writ of certiorari challenging a Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel’s finding that a North Carolina federal judge was wrong to reopen the man’s complaint against North Carolina and multiple elected officials; the panel said the judge failed to justify the reasons for applying a 2006 high court ruling in the 2021 decision that revived copyright infringement claims centering around images depicting the sunken remains of the pirate Blackbeard’s flagship.
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October 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 19 due to lack of a quorum affirmed a Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision to uphold a Louisiana federal judge’s determination that a songwriter and his corporation, and not a music publishing company, own the worldwide copyrights associated with the early rock ‘n’ roll song “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).”
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October 16, 2026
PITTSBURGH — A federal magistrate judge in Pennsylvania ordered that parties’ bonds remain in place in a dispute over intellectual property rights related to a fudge recipe while the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals mulls appellate attorney fees; a partially split appeals court panel in July affirmed an award of attorney fees against plaintiff entities for their unsuccessful copyright and trademark claims in the dispute and affirmed their jury victory on trade secret claims.
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October 06, 2026
LOS ANGELES — Summary judgment in favor of Quizlet Inc. stands following a California federal judge’s conclusion that a nursing test preparation company did not meet the standard for reconsideration in an artificial intelligence-related copyright infringement lawsuit.
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October 02, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals became at least the second federal appellate court to address artificial intelligence copyright issues after unsealing an opinion finding that while the technology is new, traditional principles govern the case and that a legal research competitor’s use of copyrighted material was not fair use.
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October 02, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a California federal judge’s decision to dismiss coders’ claims that Microsoft Corp. and online code platform GitHub Inc. violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate new code; the panel determined that the generation of new code without attribution could not support a claim that the technology entities removed copyright management information (CMI).
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October 02, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a New Jersey federal judge’s dismissal of a professor’s copyright infringement suit against the New Jersey Institute of Technology, finding that the alleged similarities between two machine-learning courses concerned unprotected ideas and that the potentially protected expression of these ideas differed too much for a reasonable fact finder to find substantial similarity.
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October 01, 2026
NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York denied a media outlet’s motion to dismiss a copyright complaint filed against it by Playboy Enterprises International Inc., holding that the factors weighed against a finding that the outlet’s use of a model’s photograph in an article about Playboy’s return to nude photos constituted a fair use.
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September 30, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Sept. 29 issued a judgment announcing a sealed opinion affirming summary judgment for legal publisher Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH on claims that Ross Intelligence Inc. trained its artificial intelligence on copyrighted material.
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September 28, 2026
CHICAGO — An Illinois federal judge entered a final judgment in favor of a photojournalist whose copyrighted footage of protests that occurred in summer 2020 was infringed by the city of Chicago and a former top police officer, ordering that the photojournalist be paid nearly $200,000 in damages, prejudgment interest and costs and entering a permanent injunction against the city defendants; however, the judge denied the photojournalist’s motion for attorney fees.
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September 25, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A partly split District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated the Copyright Royalty Board’s allocation of royalties related to the retransmission of copyrighted sporting events between 2014 and 2017, finding that even though the board evaluated its valuation methods, it never explained how it combined the results to reach the final allocation percentages.
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September 21, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Sept. 18 stayed until December a lawsuit by the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office challenging her purported removal by President Donald J. Trump; the stay is in light of a bill awaiting Senate approval that “would make clear that the Register of Copyrights is an officer ‘appointed by the President’ with the advice and consent of the Senate.”
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September 16, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Finding that a coding technology company still held a valid exclusive license to a series of patents and copyrights when it shifted its business to enforcement of intellectual property, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel reversed a Delaware federal court’s dismissal of the company’s suit against Broadcom Inc. and other defendant-appellees because the university that owned the intellectual property was not an otherwise necessary party and because the plaintiff-appellant’s license was not terminated as a result of the shift in business.
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September 15, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal magistrate judge declined to order nonparties Anthropic PBC and OpenAI OpCo LLC to produce information related to market substitution, licensing and torrenting practices, finding that differences in the artificial intelligence models and relevance issues defeat discovery efforts in a trio of copyright cases against Meta Platforms Inc.
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September 10, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Sept. 9 denied a Dutch software company’s request to stay a North Carolina federal judge’s amended preliminary injunction and delay trial while it sought review by the high court in a dispute over a North Carolina company’s trademarked branding, copyrighted code and trade secrets.
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September 04, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel in July vacated a $12.7 million judgment against the United States awarded to software entities by a judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the entities argue in a recently filed petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc that the panel improperly approved a hypothetical license negotiation even though the parties had twice negotiated arm’s-length licenses establishing infringed software’s market value.
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September 03, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a District of Columbia federal judge’s finding that a medical device repair exemption that allows for the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) to access clinical-operation software to diagnose, maintain or repair a device was reasonable, saying the Library of Congress reasonably concluded that such access is likely fair use.
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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.