Copyright Lawsuit Cases: AI, Music, and Supreme Court

Copyright lawsuit cases in 2025 and 2026 are dominated by a single question — whether training artificial intelligence on copyrighted work is infringement or fair use — layered on top of a steady stream of music, software, photography, and secondary-liability disputes. The headline results so far: a $1.5 billion class settlement against Anthropic, a unanimous Supreme Court reversal of a billion-dollar judgment against Cox Communications, split rulings on AI training in cases against Meta and Thomson Reuters, and a tightened fair use standard from the Warhol decision that now governs how courts assess transformative use. More than 70 AI-related copyright suits have been filed since 2022, and overall federal copyright filings have climbed from fewer than 2,000 in 2010 to over 4,500 in 2025.¹²

AI Training Lawsuits

No federal appellate court has yet decided whether using copyrighted works to train a large language model is fair use. District courts have begun to answer, and they are not agreeing.

Bartz v. Anthropic

Nearly 500,000 authors sued Anthropic, alleging the company downloaded their books from pirate repositories — Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror — to train its Claude chatbot.³ In June 2025, the court issued a split summary judgment: using copyrighted books to train an AI model was “exceedingly” transformative and therefore fair use, but Anthropic’s storage of pirated copies of those books was not.¹

Facing statutory damages for the downloading itself, Anthropic agreed in September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion into a settlement fund covering 482,460 specific books — roughly $3,100 per work, split 50/50 by default between authors and publishers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys sought 25% of the fund, or $375 million. Anthropic was also required to destroy the pirated datasets and certify destruction within 30 days of final judgment.⁴ The settlement released Anthropic from liability for past acquisition and use of the identified works but did not establish any future licensing arrangement or cover claims about AI-generated outputs. Some authors, including journalist John Carreyrou, opted out to pursue individual claims.⁵

The OpenAI Multidistrict Litigation

Twelve separate cases against OpenAI, including New York Times v. OpenAI and Authors Guild v. OpenAI, have been consolidated into a single MDL in the Southern District of New York under Judge Sidney Stein.¹ The Times case, filed in December 2023, alleges direct and contributory infringement and seeks billions in damages along with destruction of models trained on its content.⁶

In March 2025, Judge Stein denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss most counts, allowing both direct and contributory infringement claims to proceed. His 43-page opinion emphasized that “numerous and well-publicized” instances of ChatGPT generating content derived from Times articles supported the contributory liability claims. That ruling diverged from decisions by California district courts, setting up a possible circuit split on AI training and fair use. Summary judgment briefing concluded in April 2026.⁶

Kadrey v. Meta

Authors sued Meta over its Llama model, alleging training on books sourced from pirate “shadow libraries” via BitTorrent. In June 2025, the court granted partial summary judgment for Meta, finding the use of books for LLM training “highly transformative” and fair use, regardless of whether the source material was legitimately obtained.³ The case continues on a narrower question: whether Meta infringed by “seeding” (uploading) pirated copies back to other users during the BitTorrent process.¹

Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence

Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence for using copyrighted Westlaw headnotes to train an AI legal research tool. In February 2025, a Delaware district court granted summary judgment for Thomson Reuters, finding the headnotes original and protected and ruling that Ross’s use for AI training was not fair use.¹ Ross appealed, and the Third Circuit heard oral arguments on June 11, 2026. A ruling is expected within several months.⁷ It is the first federal appellate examination of AI training and fair use, drawing amicus briefs from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Authors Alliance, and industry groups.⁸

Other AI Fronts

Getty Images v. Stability AI: A UK trial in June 2025 ended with a November 2025 judgment finding trademark infringement and confirming AI models are subject to copyright claims in the same manner as physical objects. Getty filed a U.S. case in the Northern District of California, with a jury trial scheduled for January 2028.⁹¹⁰
Disney v. Midjourney: Disney, Lucasfilm, and Marvel sued over training on copyrighted works and output that reproduces iconic characters. The case is pending in California. Separately, Disney signed a three-year, $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI for AI-generated video.³
Perplexity AI: The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Merriam-Webster filed suits in late 2025 targeting Perplexity’s retrieval-augmented generation technology, which plaintiffs allege scrapes and reproduces copyrighted content “verbatim” in its answers.¹
Concord Music v. Anthropic: Music publishers including Universal Music Group alleged Claude reproduces copyrighted lyrics. In March 2025, the court denied a preliminary injunction and dismissed contributory and vicarious infringement claims while letting direct infringement claims proceed. A summary judgment hearing is scheduled for July 2026.¹¹¹²
AI music licensing: Universal and Warner settled with AI music generator Udio in late 2025, establishing licensing deals for a new subscription service. Warner also settled with Suno in November 2025.¹

Can AI-Generated Work Be Copyrighted?

On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, finalizing lower-court rulings that human authorship is a fundamental requirement for copyright protection. Dr. Stephen Thaler had sought to register an AI-generated artwork titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”; courts at every level rejected the application.³

Recent Supreme Court Copyright Rulings

Cox Communications v. Sony Music (2026)

On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously reversed a billion-dollar judgment against Cox Communications in a landmark ruling on secondary copyright liability. The underlying jury verdict in the Eastern District of Virginia awarded Sony and other labels $1 billion in statutory damages after they proved Cox had received over 163,000 notices linking subscriber IP addresses to alleged copyright violations over two years.¹³ The Fourth Circuit had affirmed the contributory infringement finding.

Writing for the Court, Justice Thomas held that an ISP is contributorily liable for subscriber infringement only if the provider either “actively encouraged” infringement or offered a service incapable of “substantial” or “commercially significant” noninfringing uses. Simply knowing some subscribers would use internet access to infringe was not enough.¹⁴ Because Cox neither promoted infringement nor built a service tailored for it, it could not be held liable. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, concurred in the result but expressed concern that the majority’s approach could weaken ISP cooperation with copyright owners under the DMCA notice-and-takedown system.¹⁵

Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (2023)

The 7-2 decision issued May 18, 2023, tightened the standard for claiming fair use when a secondary work serves the same commercial purpose as the original. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith took a 1981 studio portrait of Prince. Andy Warhol used it as a reference for a silkscreen series; after Prince’s death in 2016, the Warhol Foundation licensed one of those prints to Condé Nast for $10,000 for a commemorative magazine. Goldsmith received nothing.¹⁶

Justice Sotomayor’s majority opinion held that when the original work and the secondary use share the same commercial purpose, adding “new expression or meaning” is not enough on its own to tip the first fair use factor toward the secondary user. Because Goldsmith’s photograph and the Foundation’s license both served as portraits of Prince for magazine publication, the purposes were “substantially the same,” and the first factor favored the copyright holder.¹⁶ The ruling was explicitly limited to the specific licensing transaction and did not address whether Warhol’s original creation of the Prince Series was itself transformative.¹⁷ Justice Kagan dissented, arguing the majority contradicted the Court’s reasoning in Google v. Oracle and that Warhol’s transformation of the photograph’s “humanistic” qualities into a “masklike” aesthetic fundamentally altered the work’s meaning.¹⁸

Google v. Oracle (2021)

In a 6-2 ruling by Justice Breyer, the Court held that Google’s copying of roughly 11,500 lines of declaring code from Oracle’s Java API to build Android was fair use as a matter of law.¹⁹ The Court assumed for argument’s sake that the code was copyrightable, sidestepping the broader question of API copyrightability. It found Google’s use transformative because the code was repurposed for a new computing environment (smartphones rather than desktops), the 11,500 lines represented just 0.4% of the full Java platform, and enforcing Oracle’s copyright would risk “creativity-related harms to the public” by locking programmers into one platform.²⁰

Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy (2024)

In a 6-3 ruling, the Court held that a copyright owner with a timely infringement claim is entitled to damages regardless of when the infringement occurred, declining to impose a three-year lookback cap on monetary recovery when a claim is brought under the discovery rule. Justice Kagan wrote the majority opinion; Justice Gorsuch dissented, noting the Court did not resolve whether the discovery rule itself is valid.²¹

Music Infringement Cases

Blurred Lines (Williams v. Gaye)

Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams were found liable for copying Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” in their 2013 hit “Blurred Lines.” A 2015 jury verdict set damages at $7.3 million, later reduced by the judge to $5.3 million plus 50% of future royalties for the Gaye family.²² The case was controversial because it extended protection beyond melody and lyrics to the “vibe” or “feel” of a song, including studio arrangements like bass lines and background sounds.²³

Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud

In May 2023, a Manhattan jury found Ed Sheeran not liable for infringing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.” The heirs of co-writer Ed Townsend alleged “striking similarities,” but Sheeran’s defense showed the chord progression at issue appeared in at least 13 earlier songs and two guitar textbooks.²⁴ Judge Louis Stanton emphasized that “chord progressions and harmonic rhythms are common building blocks of musical creation” and are not eligible for copyright protection. The Townsend heirs filed a notice of appeal but withdrew it with prejudice in September 2023.²⁵

Dark Horse (Gray v. Hudson)

A jury initially awarded rapper Marcus Gray $2.8 million, finding Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” infringed his song “Joyful Noise.” A judge overturned the verdict, ruling the eight-note riff at issue was “too commonplace to be copyrighted.” Individual musical elements like rhythm, pitch, and simplistic patterns are not protectable on their own.²⁶²³

Stairway to Heaven

The estate of the late Randy Wolfe, guitarist for the band Spirit, alleged Led Zeppelin copied the opening notes of “Stairway to Heaven” from Spirit’s 1968 instrumental “Taurus.” In March 2020, a jury upheld a prior verdict that the two tracks were not “intrinsically similar.”²³ The case is notable for rejecting the “inverse ratio” rule, which had previously allowed a lower threshold of substantial similarity if the defendant had access to the original work.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose (1994)

The Supreme Court’s ruling in this case, involving 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman,” established the “transformative use” framework that still dominates fair use analysis. A new work can qualify as fair use if it adds “something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.”²⁶ The decision also established that commercial use does not automatically defeat fair use and that parody can qualify as transformative.²⁷

Software and Code Cases

Apple v. Franklin Computer (1983) established that computer programs qualify as “literary works” under copyright law, a foundational holding that remains in effect.²⁸ Computer Associates v. Altai (1992) created the “abstraction-filtration-comparison” test courts use to determine which non-literal elements of software are protectable expression versus unprotectable functional elements.²⁹

In Lotus v. Borland (1996), the Supreme Court split 4-4 on whether the menu command hierarchy of a spreadsheet program was copyrightable, leaving the First Circuit’s judgment that it was not in place but creating no binding national precedent.³⁰ That unresolved question lingered for decades until Google v. Oracle, where the Court sidestepped API copyrightability and ruled on fair use grounds instead.

Reverse engineering for compatibility has been treated as fair use. In Sega v. Accolade (1992), the Ninth Circuit held that disassembling object code to create compatible games was a transformative, non-infringing use that fosters competition.²⁹

Photography and Image Enforcement

Federal copyright filings rose from fewer than 2,000 in 2010 to over 4,500 in 2025, and a substantial share of that growth comes from photographers and agencies pursuing unauthorized image use.²

Settlements in one-off image infringement cases involving small businesses typically run from $5,000 to $25,000, according to attorneys who handle high volumes of these claims. When a defendant replaces a photographer’s watermark with their own logo, settlements can go much higher; one such case settled for roughly $95,000.² Statutory damages can reach $150,000 per work for willful infringement, and that ceiling frequently drives defendants to settle.

Not everyone views this enforcement favorably. Some judges have characterized high-volume image litigation as using copyright law “as a source of revenue, rather than as redress for legitimate injury.” The Copyright Claims Board, established in 2022 to handle claims up to $30,000, provides a lower-cost alternative.²

Copyright Trolls

Some entities use mass litigation primarily as a revenue source. The strategy typically involves filing against anonymous “John Doe” defendants identified only by IP address, then leveraging statutory damages to pressure fast settlements at amounts just low enough that paying is cheaper than hiring a lawyer.

At its peak between 2014 and 2016, “John Doe” lawsuits accounted for nearly half of the federal copyright docket, concentrated heavily in districts like the Northern District of Illinois.³¹ A significant proportion involved pornographic films, which added personal embarrassment and increased settlement pressure.³²

Courts have pushed back. Prenda Law, one of the most notorious operations, was found to have engaged in “brazen misconduct and relentless fraud,” including forgery and identity theft, and its principals faced criminal charges.³¹ Righthaven, a firm that acquired copyrights solely to sue bloggers, never won a case on the merits and was ordered to pay over $200,000 in attorney fees and $5,000 in sanctions before ceasing operations.³² As courts grew skeptical of grouping thousands of IP addresses in a single suit, the average number of defendants per case dropped from over 560 in 2010 to approximately two in 2015, though the total number of individual lawsuits increased.

What Damages and Settlements Actually Look Like

The Copyright Act allows plaintiffs to elect statutory damages instead of proving actual losses. The standard range is $750 to $30,000 per infringed work. Willful infringement raises the ceiling to $150,000 per work. Innocent infringers can face reduced awards, though courts rarely classify a defendant that way in practice.³³

Those ranges create enormous leverage. In the peer-to-peer file-sharing era, juries occasionally returned verdicts wildly disproportionate to actual harm. A jury in Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset awarded $1.92 million ($80,000 per song) for downloading 24 tracks; the judge reduced it to $54,000 under remittitur, but a subsequent trial produced a $1.5 million verdict.³³ In Sony v. Tenenbaum, a $675,000 verdict for 30 songs was reduced by the judge to $67,500 as “unconstitutionally excessive.”

Most disputes never reach a verdict. Research has found that while 80 to 90 percent of copyright plaintiffs claim willful infringement in their initial filings, courts find willfulness in less than 2 percent of cases that go to judgment. The threat of the statutory ceiling, rather than the realistic probability of reaching it, is what drives most defendants to settle. In the music industry’s campaign against individual file-sharers, settlements typically ranged from $3,000 to $11,000.³⁴ Comprehensive settlement data across industries remains scarce, because most settlements are private and courts apply no standardized benchmarks.

Filing a Copyright Suit

Before any infringement suit can be filed in federal court, the copyright must be formally registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, or the Office must have refused registration. The Supreme Court settled this in Fourth Estate Public Benefit Corp. v. Wall-Street.com (2019), a unanimous decision by Justice Ginsburg that rejected the practice in some circuits of allowing suits upon merely filing an application.³⁵ The Court characterized the requirement as an “administrative exhaustion requirement” and held that “registration has been made” only when the Register has acted on the application.

Standard registration can take seven months or longer. Copyright owners who need to file suit urgently can pay an $800 fee for expedited “special handling,” which generally produces a decision within five business days.³⁶ The statute of limitations is three years from the date the claim accrues, and under Warner Chappell v. Nealy, damages are not capped at a three-year lookback window as long as the claim itself is timely.²¹ Copyright cases fall exclusively within federal court jurisdiction, and registration made within five years of first publication serves as prima facie evidence that the copyright is valid.

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