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Reservoir Media Management filed two lawsuits on Oct. 21 alleging Suno scraped 1,050 copyrighted songs, including works by Johnny Cash, Joni Mitchell and Madonna, while Anthropic used lyrics from 853 songs to train its Claude models. Reservoir is seeking $186.4 million from Suno and $151.4 million from Anthropic, citing copyright infringement, bypassing logins and paywalls, and stripping songwriter credit data.
Rights holders to Elvis Presley's music catalog, including Authentic Brands Group and Raleigh Music Publishing, filed suit against Anthropic on October 23rd seeking $41 million in damages. The complaint alleges Anthropic trained its AI models on 274 Presley songs, bypassing DRM protections and stripping copyright management information from 247 tracks including 'Don't Be Cruel' and 'Can't Help Falling in Love.'
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a jury verdict clearing Apple and M. Night Shyamalan of copyright infringement claims over the series Servant. Director Francesca Gregorini had alleged the show copied her 2013 film The Truth About Emanuel and sought up to $81 million in damages, but a jury found last year that Servant's creators never had access to her film.
USA Today Co. and several of its local newspapers, including The Tennessean, Indy Star, The Columbus Dispatch and The Oklahoman, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI. The suit alleges OpenAI copied hundreds of thousands of articles without permission to train its AI models and seeks more than $250 million in damages.
Sony Music and Universal Music Group have sued AI music generator Suno again, alleging its newly launched v6 model still infringes their copyrights. The labels argue v6 was trained on outputs from Suno's earlier models, which themselves relied on unlicensed music, and that this 'model laundering' carries the infringement forward even without direct use of the original recordings.
A US District Court awarded Nintendo $4.5 million in damages against James Williams, known online as Archbox, after he failed to respond to the company's lawsuit. Nintendo had accused Williams of running Pirate Shops and using the 190,000-member r/SwitchPirates subreddit to direct users to pirated game downloads and circumvention tools. Judge Lauren King granted the default judgment on September 23, also issuing a permanent injunction requiring Williams to shut down any related shops and stop distributing pirated titles.
Hasbro and the makers of Tetris found their intellectual property appropriated in government-produced propaganda content, prompting both companies to publicly clarify that their brands do not endorse the administration's messaging. The incidents mark a growing trend of copyright holders having to respond after official government accounts repurposed their imagery without permission.
Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group have amended their copyright lawsuit against AI music generator Suno, arguing its newly released v6 models still rely on infringing material. The labels claim Suno's own admission that v6 was trained partly on 'user interactions' with earlier models means it indirectly used previously scraped copyrighted recordings, potentially implicating over 60,000 songs.
Disney has hired Karandeep Anand, who recently led Character.AI, to serve as the company's first chief technology officer, reporting directly to CEO Josh D'Amaro. Anand will oversee enterprise technology and Disney's data and AI platforms, and is bringing several former Character.AI engineers with him. Disney is also promoting Adam Smith to a new Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer role for Disney Entertainment.
Newly unsealed portions of a legal brief in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft show internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, reportedly called AI training data scraping 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI's Head of ChatGPT, Nick Turley, described the chatbot as an 'existential threat' to publishers. The filing also cites data showing Copilot slashed click-through traffic to the Times by up to 93% compared to Bing search.
Newly unsealed court documents in the New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal admissions from both companies' executives. Microsoft's director of applied science Brent Hecht reportedly described AI training as the 'largest theft of labor in human history,' while OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman acknowledged that generative AI products pose an 'existential threat' to publishers because they are increasingly substitutive of original content.
Copyright lawsuits by The New York Times, Ziff Davis and other publishers against OpenAI are moving into a new legal phase after discovery concluded, with both sides asking a federal court to rule on whether OpenAI's use of published material qualifies as fair use. Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah publicly criticized a Trump administration filing arguing licensing requirements would burden AI firms, contrasting the U.S. music industry's roughly $20 billion in annual royalties with OpenAI's projected $750 billion computing spend through 2030.