Recent copyright infringement cases have reshaped fair use, settled that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, extended how far back damages can reach, and closed the door on large-scale digital book lending without publisher permission. The rulings below are the ones most likely to affect you if you create, license, distribute, or build products around copyrighted material.
Fair Use Narrowed in Warhol v. Goldsmith
The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith is the most consequential fair use ruling in years. Photographer Lynn Goldsmith shot a portrait of Prince in 1981. Andy Warhol used that photograph as the basis for a series of silk-screen prints, and after Prince’s death, Condé Nast licensed one of the prints for a magazine cover. Goldsmith sued. The Warhol Foundation argued the prints were transformative enough to qualify as fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107.1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 107 – Limitations on Exclusive Rights: Fair Use
The Court disagreed, 7–2. Justice Sotomayor, writing for the majority, held that the first fair use factor did not favor the Foundation because its commercial licensing of the print served essentially the same purpose as Goldsmith’s original photograph: illustrating a magazine feature about Prince.2Justia. Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. A new aesthetic layered onto a source photograph will not, by itself, make the use transformative when the two works compete in the same market.
The stakes for getting this wrong are high. Statutory damages for willful infringement can reach $150,000 per work, and even non-willful infringement runs from $750 to $30,000 per work.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 504 – Remedies for Infringement: Damages and Profits If you incorporate recognizable source material into commercial work, you now carry a heavier burden to show your use serves a genuinely different purpose than the original.
AI-Generated Works Cannot Be Copyrighted
Courts and the Copyright Office have drawn a firm line: copyright protection requires a human author. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, a computer scientist listed his AI system, the “Creativity Machine,” as the sole author of a visual artwork. The Copyright Office refused registration, and both the district court and the D.C. Circuit upheld that refusal, stating plainly that the Copyright Act requires all eligible work to be authored by a human being.4United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Thaler v. Perlmutter
The harder question is what happens when a work mixes human and AI contributions. The Copyright Office answered part of it in its 2023 decision on Zarya of the Dawn, a graphic novel by Kris Kashtanova that used AI-generated images from Midjourney. The Office granted protection for the text Kashtanova wrote and for her selection and arrangement of elements, but denied protection for the individual AI-generated images. The original registration was cancelled and replaced with one that excluded “artwork generated by artificial intelligence.”5U.S. Copyright Office. Zarya of the Dawn Registration Decision
A January 2025 Copyright Office report tightened this further. For any work containing more than a trivial amount of AI-generated material, the applicant must disclose the AI’s role and describe the human author’s contribution. Writing prompts, even detailed and iterative ones, does not qualify as authorship, because the prompter doesn’t control how the AI expresses the idea. The Office rejected the argument that significant prompt-engineering effort creates authorship rights.
If you don’t disclose AI involvement, your registration can be cancelled. Without a valid registration, you cannot sue for infringement of the AI-generated portions, and competitors can freely copy them.
AI Training on Copyrighted Data Remains Unsettled
Whether feeding copyrighted works into AI training sets constitutes infringement is the central legal question hanging over generative AI, and it remains unresolved as of early 2026.
The highest-profile dispute is The New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft, filed in December 2023. The Times alleges that OpenAI used its articles without permission to train GPT models and that the models can sometimes reproduce near-verbatim passages from behind the Times’s paywall. The case was consolidated into multidistrict litigation in the Southern District of New York and remains in pretrial proceedings. Legal observers expect the earliest substantive ruling on the fair use question no sooner than summer 2026.
One case has produced an actual ruling on related ground. In Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, a Delaware federal court granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters, finding that Ross copied 2,243 copyrighted headnotes from Westlaw to build its AI-powered legal research tool. The court rejected Ross’s fair use defense, concluding that the first and fourth factors favored Thomson Reuters. This is the first federal decision directly holding that copying copyrighted content to train an AI system is not fair use, though its facts, which involve wholesale copying of short editorial summaries for a directly competing product, are narrower than the broader training-data question most AI companies face.
The uncertainty is driving licensing deals. Several major news organizations have negotiated access agreements with AI companies rather than wait for litigation to resolve the question.
Hachette v. Internet Archive Ends Controlled Digital Lending
In Hachette Book Group v. Internet Archive, the Second Circuit held that nonprofits cannot scan physical books and lend digital copies online without publisher permission. The Internet Archive argued its “Controlled Digital Lending” program was fair use because it maintained a one-to-one ratio between physical copies owned and digital copies lent at any given time. The court rejected the defense across all four fair use factors and affirmed the district court.6Justia. Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, No. 23-1260 Large-scale copying and distribution of copyrighted books without payment to publishers or authors is what the Copyright Act prohibits, the court said, regardless of the distributor’s nonprofit mission.
Warner Chappell v. Nealy Expands Damages for Old Infringements
Under 17 U.S.C. § 507(b), a copyright infringement suit must be filed within three years of when the claim accrued.7Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 507 – Limitations on Actions The 2024 Supreme Court decision in Warner Chappell Music v. Nealy answered a separate question: whether a plaintiff who files a timely claim under the discovery rule, meaning within three years of learning about the infringement, can recover damages for infringements stretching back decades.
The Court said yes, 6–3. A copyright owner with a timely claim can obtain damages for any infringement that claim covers, no matter how long ago it occurred. The Court did not formally decide whether the discovery rule itself is valid; it assumed its validity for purposes of the case. The practical effect is still substantial. A songwriter who discovers in 2026 that a song has been used without a license since 2005 could potentially recover more than two decades of damages, provided the suit is filed within three years of the discovery.
Unicolors v. H&M Protects Registrations From Honest Errors
Before you can sue for infringement, your work must be registered with the Copyright Office. In Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P., the Supreme Court addressed a defense tactic that had become common: attacking the registration itself by pointing to application errors. H&M argued that Unicolors made inaccurate statements about whether certain fabric designs were first published together, and that the errors should invalidate the registration.
The Court held that under 17 U.S.C. § 411, a registration is only invalidated if the applicant knew the information was inaccurate when filing and the error would have caused the Copyright Office to refuse registration.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 411 – Registration and Civil Infringement Actions Honest mistakes and misunderstandings of technical registration rules do not void a registration.
Why Registration Timing Still Matters
Statutory damages and attorney’s fees, often the most powerful tools in an infringement case, are only available if the work was registered before the infringement began or within three months of first publication.9Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 412 – Registration as Prerequisite to Certain Remedies Miss that window, and you’re limited to actual damages and the infringer’s profits, which are harder and more expensive to prove.
Attorney’s fees can dwarf the damages themselves. Under 17 U.S.C. § 505, a court can award reasonable fees to the prevailing party at its discretion.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 505 – Remedies for Infringement: Costs and Attorneys Fees With IP litigation rates commonly running $400 to $600 per hour, the fee-shifting threat alone often drives settlements.
Embedding and Metadata Stripping
In Goldman v. Breitbart News Network, a photographer sued multiple news outlets that embedded a tweet containing his copyrighted photo of Tom Brady. The defendants invoked the “server test,” the Ninth Circuit’s rule from Perfect 10 v. Amazon that says embedding doesn’t infringe because the image file lives on someone else’s servers. The Southern District of New York rejected that reasoning, holding that causing an embedded image to appear on your website violates the copyright owner’s exclusive display right regardless of where the file is physically hosted.11Justia. Goldman v. Breitbart News Network LLC et al., No. 1:2017cv03144
Separately, stripping or altering copyright management information such as watermarks, metadata, and photographer credits violates 17 U.S.C. § 1202.12Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 1202 – Integrity of Copyright Management Information Damages run from $2,500 to $25,000 per violation.13Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 1203 – Civil Remedies Companies that scrape images for commercial databases or AI training sets are especially exposed, because automated collection tools routinely strip metadata as part of the process.
Music Industry: Composition Suits and Termination Rights
In Griffin v. Sheeran, the heirs of songwriter Ed Townsend alleged that Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” infringed the copyright in “Let’s Get It On.”14Justia. Griffin et al v. Sheeran et al, No. 1:2017cv05221 The jury sided with Sheeran, accepting the argument that a common chord progression, a rhythmic pattern, and similar harmonic movement are basic musical building blocks no single songwriter can own. Recent outcomes suggest courts are growing more skeptical of infringement claims built on generic musical elements, though copying a specific, distinctive melodic phrase or lyrical combination still invites liability.
A separate development involves creators reclaiming works they assigned decades ago. Under 17 U.S.C. § 203, authors who transferred their copyrights on or after January 1, 1978 can terminate those transfers during a five-year window that begins 35 years after the original deal.15Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code 203 – Termination of Transfers and Licenses Granted by the Author You must serve written notice between two and ten years before the intended termination date and file a copy with the Copyright Office. The right cannot be waived by contract. One catch for sound recordings: most label contracts classify recordings as “works made for hire,” which are exempt from termination. Musical compositions, meaning the underlying songs, are generally eligible.
The Copyright Claims Board for Smaller Disputes
Not every infringement dispute needs federal court. The Copyright Claims Board, operating since 2022, handles claims up to $30,000 in total damages, with a “smaller claims” track capped at $5,000.16U.S. Copyright Office. Copyright Claims Board Handbook – Damages The CCB can award statutory damages up to $15,000 per work for timely registered works, or $7,500 per work for works registered after infringement began.
Participation is voluntary. A respondent has 60 days from service to opt out, and if they do, the proceeding is dismissed without prejudice and the claimant can still file in federal court.17Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 17 U.S. Code Chapter 15 – Copyright Small Claims If the respondent doesn’t opt out within the window, the proceeding becomes binding. The CCB cannot award punitive damages, attorney’s fees, or compensation for lost wages or brand harm. For freelance photographers, independent musicians, and small creators who can’t afford federal litigation, it’s a realistic enforcement path. For larger disputes or any case needing injunctive relief, federal court is still the only option.