A Texas record label that prevailed in a jury trial after a seven-year legal battle over the rights to several albums by a popular Mexican group was properly awarded only $50,000 in attorney fees, the U.S. Court of Appeals had held. But the court, in finding that district court did not abuse its discretion by rejecting the label’s demand for over $600,000 in fees, affirmed a critical aspect of the label’s victory on the merits.
A writer who claims his science fiction story was purloined by James Cameron in the making of Avatar 2 is entitled to compensation, a new federal lawsuit contends. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court just days before the third anniversary of the film’s U.S. release, represents the second time that the same writer has taken on Cameron over the Avatar franchise—although this time the lawsuit adds federal copyright law to the arsenal of weapons the author wielded, without success, in the first scrap between the parties
A record label that recorded and distributed four albums by a popular Mexican band would not be entitled to summary judgment on the copyright infringement lawsuit leveled against it by a company that claims to have later acquired the rights to those albums, the federal court for Fresno, California has held. The court, in denying the motion for summary judgment, cleared the way for the dispute over the four albums—along with a companion dispute with another label over three other albums by the same band—to head to a jury trial.
A magazine publisher did not adequately allege that the operators of a well-known chat program circumvented a technical measure in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by ignoring an instruction in the publisher’s website that prohibited the copying of the website contents by a web-crawling program, the federal court for Manhattan has held. But the court, in narrowing the complaint in this and several other ways, nonetheless allowed much of the rest of the lawsuit to go forward for now.
The owner of a website that allegedly offered gaming software that infringed upon the copyrights as well as the trademarks of another software developer was entitled to argue that the First Amendment protected his right to remain anonymous in the face of a subpoena under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the federal court in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. has held. But the court, while evaluating the free speech claim on its merits, nonetheless found that the copyright holder had easily passed the threshold necessary to unmask the alleged infringer.
The fact that a corporate client exchanged in over a decade’s worth of correspondence with its outside software developer over the scope and substance of the software product meant that the two parties intended to be joint authors of the resulting source code, the federal court for Chicago has held. The court, in rejecting the software developer’s copyright infringement claim, also held that the client’s substantive contributions to the software were independently copyrightable.
A news website that embedded two videos taken by an independent videographer could not escape a copyright infringement lawsuit on the grounds that the purloined videos were not hosted on its own website, the federal court in Manhattan has held. But the court, while joining a wide range of other New York courts that have rejected the Ninth Circuit’s “server test,” nonetheless found that the use of one of the videos was protected by the doctrine of fair use because it consisted of commentary on the video by a prominent conservative news anchor.
A rock and roll music star from the 1970s and 1980s was the frontman once again at a Senate hearing over a bill that would amend the Copyright Act to compensate record labels and recording artists for terrestrial radio airplay. The hearing, in front of the Intellectual Property subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, featured a panel of Senators who appeared to unanimously favor the pending legislation—and were highly critical of the sole radio industry representative who testified in support of the status quo.
A home designer could not bring a copyright infringement lawsuit against a competing design firm or the homeowner and general contractor who hired that firm because issues arising out of the same claim had already been resolved by arbitration involving many of the same parties, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has held. The court, in affirming a pair of decisions by the federal district court for South Carolina, also found that the designer was barred by the doctrine of laches from bringing claims under the Lanham Act.
A music publisher that specializes in Latin American compositions could not relitigate the issue of whether it owned the rights to ten poems that were adapted by a Puerto Rican musician, the federal court for Puerto Rico has held. The court, in dismissing the music publisher’s counterclaim in the latest of a long-running series of legal battles between the two parties, found that the issue of ownership had already been litigated in an earlier lawsuit and there was no reason why the matter should be reopened in the current case.
A news website that reproduced from X a video of a political protest along with a screen capture of one of the frames of the video could not be liable for copyright infringement for use of the single screen capture because it constituted a de minimis use of the underlying work, the federal court for Manhattan has held. But the court, in granting in part and dismissing in part the copyright owner’s lawsuit against the media company that posted the video, joined a growing number of courts who have found—at least on the face of the agreements themselves—that X’s terms of service do not allow the free use of works that are posted on the social media platform.
A leading UK fashion brand will have to face allegations that it purloined the work of a visual artist when it incorporated that artist’s sculptural designs into a line of apparel and then later collaborated to produce a set of fabrics and accessories with the same design, the federal court for Cleveland has held. The court, in a wide-ranging opinion rejecting a motion to dismiss brought by the UK company and its alleged collaborators, found that the UK entities had sufficient ties to the United States to be subject to the court’s jurisdiction and that the visual artist had adequately stated claims of direct and secondary copyright infringement, as well as violations of the DMCA.
A former presidential candidate and several other faith-based authors adequately stated a copyright infringement claim against the developer of a finance-based artificial intelligence large language mode, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in dismissing a motion to dismiss the class action lawsuit, also found that it was too early in the case to determine whether the development of the financial chat program was protected by the doctrine of fair use.
A software developer who claimed that the Navy unlawfully converted its software by holding onto it and making copies of it could not get around the preemption doctrine by asserting that the Navy also held onto the physical CD in which that software was embedded, a federal judge in the Washington, D.C. area has held. The court, emphasizing that the preemption doctrine “cannot be so easily circumvented,” also found in a separate case that the subcontractor had failed to adequately state copyright infringement and trade secrets claims against the prime contractor.
The two authors behind a popular series of fictional works are entitled to move forward on their claim that another writer and her publishers purloined their works, the federal court in San Diego has held. But the court, in dismissing for the second time a motion to dismiss by the accused author and her publishers, found that the two authors had moved too slowly to preserve their claims for statutory damages and attorney fees.
A fabric designer was entitled to seek statutory damages and attorney fees for copyright infringement that began well before she registered her work because the infringing activity had ceased for many years before starting up again after the registration, the federal court for Philadelphia has held. But the court, in wading into an area that has divided courts, underscored that the mere fact that the later infringement was of another type would not have been sufficient on its own, absent the prolonged cessation of infringement, to restart the statutory damages clock.
The owner and operator of ChatGPT committed copyright infringement when it reproduced the lyrics of nine well-known German songs within the large language model that powers the ubiquitous artificial intelligence network, a German federal court has held. The Munich-based tribunal, in enjoining OpenAI from further reproduction of the works, also found that the AI company infringed on the copyrights in those lyrics when it reproduced recognizable portions of them in response to user queries.
A Canadian tech company that scraped up copies of newspaper and magazine articles to power an artificial intelligence service would not get a speedy exit to a copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit filed against it by a group of publishing companies, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in denying the company’s motion to dismiss, emphasized that the publishers adequately alleged that the AI company directly infringed copyrights—and induced its own users to infringe as well—by reproducing copyrighted works in response to user inputs. The court also found that the complaint adequately stated trademark infringement claims under the Lanham Act.
Social media and chatbot giant X would not be entitled to entitled to obtain discovery from one of its leading competitors in California in order to support a lawsuit pending in the United Kingdom against a former software engineer accused of pilfering company secrets, the federal court for San Francisco has held. The court, in denying X’s application for discovery to support the foreign proceeding, found that the discovery requests were premature, overly broad, and essentially a “fishing expedition” aimed at gaining an unfair advantage in both the U.K. action as well as X’s own lawsuit against the same competitor in California.
The owner and operator of a prominent rock and roll museum made a fair use of two photographs of a rock and roll legend because it uses them as “but one of many design elements” in an exhibit that focused on the guitars and related sound equipment that the musician used during his lengthy career, the federal court for Cleveland has held. The court, in granting the museum’s motion to dismiss on the pleadings, also found that the photographer failed to allege harm to the market for his work because he did not claim that he had ever previously licensed his photographs to museums.
A young rapper who alleged that a chart-topping stage performer purloined his beat track could not prevail on his copyright infringement claim because he had registered only a copyright in the sound recording of the beat and not in the underlying composition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has held. But the court, in affirming the district court’s grant of summary judgment against the young rapper, also agreed that he was not required to pay attorney fees in the case.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected copyright protection for a car that was a centerpiece for several popular movies based on an “essentially standardless three-part test that contradicts an on-point decision of [the Supreme] Court and is at odds with the test applied by three other Circuit Courts,” a new petition for certiorari asserts. The petition, which asks the Court to resolve a putative circuit split over the standard for protecting a fictional character, also takes the court of appeals to task for imposing a requirement that a character possess “anthropomorphic” qualities in order to gain protection under the law.
“The Copyright Office has ambiguously deemed humanity as the sine qua non of copyright [even though] this Court has explained the only sine qua non is originality,” a prominent AI inventor has told the Supreme Court. The inventor’s petition for certiorari, which will surely earn points for legal creativity even if it does not lead to a hearing before the nation’s top court, argues that the human authorship requirement was invented by the Copyright Office and that property owners are entitled to “property made by their property.”
The Supreme Court should decide whether a consumer of a popular children’s toy has the legal standing to oppose the registration of a trademark in those goods, a new petition for certiorari asserts. The petition, filed on behalf of a law professor and longtime afficionado of the toy in question, points to a split among the federal courts of appeals over whether and how the principles of Article III standing in federal court should be applied to administrative agency proceedings.
Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and three other writers will not be deposed in ongoing class-action litigation against OpenAI, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in the latest of a flurry of discovery rulings in a series of now-consolidated actions against the generative artificial intelligence company, found that the mere fact that the five writers were once named plaintiffs in other lawsuits against OpenAI, without more, could support their being dragged back into the case.
The company that owns and operates a popular AI chatbox allegedly gathered enough information on its users’ habits to make it responsible for those users’ infringement of copyrighted music lyrics, the federal court for San Jose, California has ruled. The court, in denying the AI service’s motion to dismiss a copyright infringement complaint by the owners of those lyrics, also found that the complaint adequately alleged that the company removed protected copyright management information with the intention to enable or conceal future acts of infringement.
Chinese e-commerce merchant Temu will be permitted to moved forward with copyright and trademark infringement claims against its longtime rival Shein, the federal court for the District of Columbia has held. But the court, in partially denying Shein’s motion to dismiss the complaint, found that Temu had not adequately pleaded trade secret misappropriation and antitrust claims against its e-commerce rival
A Puerto Rican musician and composer could not proceed with a lawsuit against a music publisher it accused of improperly diverting music streaming remedies because he did not state a claim for copyright infringement and Congress had not created any other federal right of action to pursue such claims, the federal court for Puerto Rico has held. The court, in dismissing the claim, nonetheless made clear that the aggrieved copyright holder could pursue an action in the nature of unjust enrichment in a local court in the island commonwealth.
The author and streaming service behind the dystopian survival thriller “Squid Game” will get an early exit from accusations that they pirated the work of a Bollywood screenwriter, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in dismissing the complaint on the pleadings, found that the Indian-born claimant did not have standing to bring the lawsuit and that the two works were “dramatically and drastically different from one another.”
A jury could not reasonably find that X’s terms of service freely permitted users to embed the posts of other users on their own feeds, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in granting summary judgment to a videographer who documented a number of noteworthy news events in the year 2021 through 2023, also found that the unlicensed re-embedding of videos posted to X threatened market harm to the entire licensing market for the work and not merely harm to the market for X embeds.
The organization that collects digital streaming royalties on behalf of music publishers and songwriters sufficiently alleged that Spotify cheated it out of revenues by artificially inflating the value of the audiobooks component of a bundled offering that combined audiobook listening and music streaming, the federal court for Manhattan has held. The court, in giving the music collective leave to file an amended complaint with its allegations against Spotify, also rejected the digital streaming company’s argument, based on a new Supreme Court precedent, that the court should have stood by its earlier dismissal of the complaint with prejudice.
A federal judge in San Francisco has given his preliminary approval to a $1.5 billion settlement over the pirated use of books to train the large language model powering a popular AI “chatbox” service, according to public reports and a brief docket order filed by the court. The settlement, described by the parties as “the largest copyright settlement in the world,” comes shortly after the parties filed a joint response to 34 detailed questions that the court had posed in response to settlement agreement originally submitted—and widely reported on—earlier this month.
A generative artificial company that creates digital music files in response to user prompts has been hacking into YouTube and downloading music without a license in order to better train its models, a new filing by major record labels asserts. The filing, which comes in the form of a motion for leave to file an amended complaint in the federal court in Boston, adds a new claim under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to an already pending copyright infringement lawsuit against the AI company.
Two software developers who emulated the characters and settings of a popular video game in their own competing version could be held liable for a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) even though they did not directly hack into the servers where the original software code was hosted, the federal court for San Diego has held. The court, in granting a preliminary injunction on behalf of the copyright holder for the original game, found that the two coders likely circumvented technical measures, in violation of the DMCA, by altering files to redirect users to their own servers and thereby bypass the login verification URL’s of the original game-maker.
A trial attorney who successfully defended a claim that he purloined a jury consultant’s study and replicated it while defending one of the alleged perpetrators of the events of January 6, 2021, would not be entitled to attorney fees under the Copyright Act because the copyright owner nonetheless prevailed on other aspects of her claim and won a jury award of damages, the federal court for Washington, D.C. has held. But the court, in rejecting the demand for fees, nonetheless reduce the amount that the attorney would have to pay in damages.
A company that creates template language for use by home inspectors failed to state a claim for copyright infringement against one of its competitors because the competitor merely hosted sample reports created and uploaded by its users and because the complaint failed to identify with specificity just which user-generated reports, if any, unlawfully reproduced the template language at issue, the federal court for Colorado has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss on the pleadings, also found that the copyright owner failed to allege with sufficient sufficiency claims for false advertising claims under the Lanham Act and violation of Colorado consumer protection law.
A trial attorney who successfully defended a claim that he purloined a jury consultant’s study and replicated it while defending one of the alleged perpetrators of the events of January 6, 2021, would not be entitled to attorney fees under the Copyright Act because the copyright owner nonetheless prevailed on other aspects of her claim and won a jury award of damages, the federal court for Washington, D.C. has held. But the court, in rejecting the demand for fees, nonetheless reduce the amount that the attorney would have to pay in damages.
A company that creates template language for use by home inspectors failed to state a claim for copyright infringement against one of its competitors because the competitor merely hosted sample reports created and uploaded by its users and because the complaint failed to identify with specificity just which user-generated reports, if any, unlawfully reproduced the template language at issue, the federal court for Colorado has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss on the pleadings, also found that the copyright owner failed to allege with sufficient sufficiency claims for false advertising claims under the Lanham Act and violation of Colorado consumer protection law.
A videographer who claimed that Reuters news service purloined his footage of record-breaking winter storms in Buffalo would not be entitled to recover damages in the form of lost licensing fees because he was “looking for a windfall” without the evidence to support his damage estimate, the federal court for Manhattan has held. But the court, while narrowing the videographer’s claim of actual damages, held that he could still pursue a claim for statutory damages based on the media company’s allegedly willful infringement.
A late-night talk show host who mocked a former congressman’s ostensible willingness to “say anything for money” in personalized video greetings made a fair use of the politician’s words, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has held. The court, in affirming the Manhattan federal court’s dismission of the copyright infringement lawsuit, emphasized that the TV host used the recorded greetings for a different purpose than the original and that any harm to the market for the politician’s video greetings was a result of the parody and therefore not actionable.
The named plaintiffs in a putative class action over Google’s generative artificial intelligence services could not rope Google’s parent company Alphabet into the proceedings, the federal court for San Jose, California has held. The court, in granting a motion to dismiss the parent company from the action, underscored that the named plaintiffs identified nothing that would tie Alphabet to the allegedly infringing conduct beyond the mere fact that Alphabet and Google had a traditional parent-subsidiary relationship.
A gravestone designer will have to persuade a federal jury that its designs had independent economic value in order to collect statutory damages for each design individually rather than as a group of collections, the federal court for Columbus, Georgia has held. But the court, in rejecting the designer’s motion for summary judgment on the statutory damages claim, narrowed the scope of trial in other ways by concluding as a matter of law that the designer had a legally meritorious copyright infringement claim.
An artist who waited to file suit more than three years after an allegedly infringing video was uploaded to the internet was barred by the statute of limitations from pursuing her claim, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has held. The court, in its second encounter with the lawsuit—itself the third of three lawsuits brought by the same artist over the same works—emphasized that the statute of limitations began upon the artist’s discovery of the alleged infringement and not, as the artist contended, at the later time that the Copyright Office ruled on the application for registration of her works.
A lawsuit between a cultural icon of the disco era and her one-time music producer will be transferred from its current venue of Manhattan to a federal court in Los Angeles, the Manhattan federal court has held. The court, in transferring the case, avoided the need to tangle with the merits of a high-profile lawsuit that accused the former producer of absconding with royalties, wrongly claiming ownership of popular music compositions and sound recordings, and allegedly forging signatures on intellectual property transfer agreements.
The unlicensed use of books to train the large language model powering a popular AI “chatbox” services “was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act,” the federal court for San Francisco has held. But the court’s landmark decision—the first to directly opine on whether the training of generative AI models could be considered fair use—comes with some important limitations that may distinguish it from other AI-related cases pending throughout the federal judiciary.