AI Copyright Lawsuits

Direct copyright; Lanham Act false designation

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory (consolidates Alter/Sancton; with Basbanes)

Vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1); 1201(a)(1)(A)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; Lanham Act

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)

DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3) on appeal; state law

On Appeal

Direct copyright; state law

Direct copyright; vicarious; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3); state law (consolidates Tremblay, Silverman, Chabon)

Direct copyright; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3)

Direct copyright; motion for leave 1201(a) claim

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory

Direct copyright; contributory infringement; DMCA 1202(a)(1)/(b)(1)/(b)(3); state law (consolidates Chabon, Farnsworth, Huckabee)

GEMA claims that AI music platform Suno infringed copyright by (1) generating music content that closely resembles GEMA member works, and (2) using GEMA works for AI model training without authorisation. Affected tracks…

Direct copyright; DMCA 1202(a)/(b); Lanham Act; unfair comp.; trademark dilution

Direct copyright; inducement; DMCA 1202(a)/(b)(1); Lanham Act; state law

DMCA 1202(b)(1) (rejected on MTD)

DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3)

Direct copyright; Lanham Act

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; Lanham Act (false designation, trademark)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3); Lanham Act (consolidates Daily News, CIR)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; Lanham Act

Direct copyright (tentative settlement)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3); Lanham Act; state law

Direct copyright; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3); 1201(A)(1) circumvention; trademark dilution; unjust enrichment

Penguin Random House sued OpenAI's European subsidiary, alleging that ChatGPT unlawfully 'memorised' and can reproduce text, images, and cover designs from Ingo Siegner's beloved German children's book series 'Der klein…

Plaintiffs, authors who opted out of the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, allege copyright infringement by AI companies including Anthropic for using their works obtained from shadow libraries without authorization to tra…

Plaintiffs allege defendants Kunlun Tech Co., Ltd. and Skywork AI Pte. Ltd. systematically copied, ingested, stored, and used plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings (registered and unregistered), musical compositions…

First AI copyright lawsuit in Italy. RTI (broadcaster) and Medusa Film (film producer) allege Perplexity AI massively and systematically acquired, copied, and stored their proprietary audiovisual and film content — incl…

Publishers of nine regional newspapers, including The San Diego Union-Tribune LLC, allege that Microsoft and OpenAI systematically copied, stored, and used hundreds of thousands of their copyrighted news articles withou…

First Danish lawsuit by a rights organisation against an AI music company. KODA alleges Suno trained its AI model on Danish artists' copyrighted songs without permission or payment, and that Suno concealed the scope and…

Quebec visual artist Chloé Sabourin filed an application to commence class actions against both Meta and OpenAI on behalf of persons domiciled in Quebec who hold copyright in artistic works used without authorisation by…

First major generative AI copyright case in Brazil. Folha de S.Paulo alleges OpenAI: (1) unlawfully scraped and used its copyrighted journalistic content — including paywall-protected articles — to train ChatGPT without…

DJV claims that standard contractual terms used between the newspaper and freelance journalists — requiring journalists to grant the paper rights to use their articles for AI training — are unfair contract terms creatin…

Hungarian news publisher Like Company alleged Google's Gemini (Bard) chatbot reproduced and communicated to the public substantial portions of its press articles without consent between June 2023 and February 2024. The…

First major AI copyright case in France. Three French authors' and publishers' associations allege Meta used their members' copyright-protected literary and creative works without authorisation or consent to train its L…

Quebec-based self-published novelist Anne Robillard filed an application in the Quebec Superior Court in March 2025 seeking authorisation to commence a class action on behalf of all persons domiciled in Quebec who hold…

India's major music labels allege OpenAI used their copyrighted sound recordings, musical compositions, and lyrics without authorisation to train its AI models. Sought to intervene in ANI v. OpenAI; Justice Amit Bansal…

A Munich local court held that AI-generated logos in this case did not meet the threshold for copyright protection because they lacked sufficient identifiable human creative influence. The court clarified that AI-genera…

A Frankfurt court held that: (1) song lyrics initially created by a human and subsequently combined with AI-generated music remain eligible for copyright protection, provided the lyrics were created by a human and indep…

A German court held that the unlicensed use of an AI-generated voice that is strikingly similar to a real voice actor's voice in a commercial YouTube video infringes the actor's right of personality (Persönlichkeitsrech…

The Beijing Internet Court held that while copyright can exist in AI-generated images, the person asserting authorship must demonstrate they exerted creative effort in producing the AI-generated creation, reflecting per…

Described as the first Shanghai case involving alleged copyright infringement by AI large-model/LoRA-generated output. The defendant collected 20+ copyrighted character images from the Yuewen IP series 'Battle Through t…

Danish court confirmed that BoligPortal's rental listing database was protected by database rights due to significant investment. BoligPortal's HTML-linked opt-out statement (restricting scraping) qualified as an effect…

The FIP, representing Indian and international book publishers, alleges OpenAI used copyrighted literary and academic works without authorisation to train ChatGPT. Filed as an intervention/impleadment application in the…

Canada's first and largest AI copyright case. A coalition of Canada's leading news publishers alleges OpenAI: (1) scraped and reproduced their copyrighted news content without licence or payment to train ChatGPT (copyri…

India's first AI copyright case. ANI (Indian wire news agency) alleges OpenAI: (1) used automated web crawlers to scrape its copyrighted news articles without authorisation to train ChatGPT; (2) reproduced article conte…

GEMA sued OpenAI for copyright infringement of song lyrics of nine well-known German songs (including 'Atemlos', 'Männer', 'Über den Wolken') used to train GPT-4 and GPT-4o. The court ruled on 11 November 2025 largely i…

Plaintiffs allege OpenAI surreptitiously transcribed millions of YouTube users' videos without authorization, including plaintiff Petryazhna's copyrighted videos such as "A Bubble World," and used the transcriptions to…

Plaintiffs allege Google surreptitiously and without consent transcribed millions of YouTube users' videos, including plaintiff's registered copyrighted works, to create training datasets for its Gemini AI products. The…

Andre Dubus III and Susan Orlean, authors owning registered copyrights in books alleged to be included in the training dataset used by NVIDIA to train its NeMo Megatron large language models, filed a class action compla…

Authors Abdi Nazemian, Brian Keene, and Stewart O'Nan filed a class action complaint alleging direct copyright infringement by MosaicML for training its MPT LLM models on the RedPajama-Books dataset, a copy of Books3 fr…

Shanghai Cultural Development discovered in early 2024 that the AI platform operated by Hangzhou Intelligent Technology allowed users to create, apply and share LoRA models to generate images substantially similar to co…

Hungarian appeals court held that downloading and storing data in a search engine's index for the purpose of creating AI-generated snippets of press articles was permitted under the TDM exception (Art. 4 DSM Directive).…

Pictoright alleges Meta (operator of Facebook and Instagram) failed to obtain a collective licence for copyrighted images uploaded and used on its platforms, and failed to make 'best efforts' to negotiate such a licence…

Getty Images alleged that Stability AI's Stable Diffusion model infringed copyright, database rights, and trade marks by scraping and using millions of Getty watermarked images as training data without licence. After tr…

Landmark Beijing Internet Court ruling recognising for the first time in China that an AI-generated image can be protected by copyright and that the human prompter can be the author. Li created an image using Stable Dif…

A Czech court ruled that under Czech copyright law, only natural persons can be authors of copyright-protected works. An image generated by AI based on a common prompt does not qualify for copyright protection, as it la…

Photographer Kneschke sued LAION after the non-profit downloaded his photograph from a stock photo agency website in 2021 to create the LAION-5B open-source training dataset. The Hamburg Regional Court dismissed the cla…

Dutch media companies claimed HowardsHome's AI-generated article summaries infringed their copyright, press publisher's right, and database rights. Court ruled on 30 December 2024: (1) TDM exception (Art. 4 DSM Directiv…

State law (removed on federal preemption)

Direct copyright (consolidates Dubus v. NVIDIA)

DMCA 1201(a) (consolidated with Businessing)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; Lanham Act

Direct copyright (dismissed on MTD due to license)

Direct copyright

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory (stayed/consolidated with Authors Guild)

Direct copyright (related to In re OpenAI MDL)

DMCA 1201(a) (consolidated with Ace Cam)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1)

Direct copyright (multi-defendant)

Direct copyright

Direct copyright (8-defendant)

DMCA-related (related to Ted Entertainment v. Snap)

Direct copyright; vicarious; DMCA 1202(b)(1); CFAA; state law

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory

Direct copyright; contributory infringement; DMCA 1202(b)

DMCA 1201(a); CA UCL

DMCA 1201(a)(1)(A)/(a)(2)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; unjust enrichment

Direct copyright (consolidated with Martinez-Conde and Alexander)

Direct copyright

Direct copyright; vicarious infringement; DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3) (consolidating Zhang and Leovy)

Direct copyright; vicarious (consolidates O'Nan and Makkai)

Direct copyright (consolidating Tanzer and Alexander)

Direct copyright

Direct copyright

Direct copyright

Direct copyright; DMCA 1201(a); Tennessee Consumer Protection Act

Direct copyright; DMCA 1201(a)

Direct copyright

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(a)/(b); 1201(a)/(b); Lanham Act; BIPA; IRPA; UDTPA; ICFA; unjust enrichment

Direct copyright

Direct copyright; state law (voluntarily dismissed)

Direct copyright; state law (voluntarily dismissed)

Direct copyright; state law

DMCA 1202(b)(1)/(b)(3); state law

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1201(a)

Direct copyright; contributory; DMCA 1202(b)(1); trademark infringement/counterfeiting/dilution; state law

Direct copyright; DMCA 1201(a)

DMCA 1202(a)(2)/(b); 1201; state law (SETTLED)

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(a)/(b); 1201(a); BIPA; IRPA; UDTPA; unjust enrichment

Direct copyright; vicarious; contributory; DMCA 1202(a)/(b); 1201(a); BIPA; IRPA; UDTPA; unjust enrichment

DMCA 1201(a) (voluntarily dismissed)

DMCA 1201(a) (voluntarily dismissed)