The AI opinions lead Law360's review of notable copyright decisions so far in 2025, but there were plenty of other notable developments, including a Ninth Circuit ruling that found a pair of pop stars must continue fighting allegations that they ripped off a song to create a 2019 hit single.
Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC and Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. et al.
U.S. District Judges William Alsup and Vince Chhabria are overseeing lawsuits brought by separate groups of bestselling authors against Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms, respectively, alleging the tech companies used their copyrighted books without permission or payment to train large language models.
After hearing fair use arguments from the parties in May, each judge was set to become the first federal jurist to submit opinions on whether AI developers made fair use of the plaintiffs' works.
Judge Alsup, an esteemed 80-year-old jurist who has hinted at retiring soon, issued the first ruling on June 23, praising Anthropic's technology as "spectacularly" transformative while condemning the company's use of pirated works to achieve it. The judge said that, while Anthropic's use of copyrighted books to train AI systems was fair, it would have to face a trial for downloading millions of books from pirating websites.
Two days after Judge Alsup's ruling, Judge Chhabria issued his own opinion, also finding Meta's large language model to be transformative. But while he also disapproved of Meta downloading millions of books, most of his ire was directed at the plaintiffs for presenting "weak" evidence on what he considers a winnable argument against fair use — that a proliferation of AI-generated books, trained on copyrighted material, could dilute their marketplace.
Both rulings are expected to be appealed.
Danielle Bulger, a partner at ArentFox Schiff LLP, said Judge Alsup calling Anthropic's technology spectacularly transformative is "a really strong statement for a judge to make, especially on summary judgment."
"I think it gives a lot of hope to technology companies that are looking to use third-party works to train their LLMs," she said, adding that there was also something for plaintiffs in the case to be happy about, because Judge Alsup made "a strong determination" regarding the pirating of their works.
"I think both sides are walking away with something in this decision," Bulger said.
Marcella Ballard, a partner at Venable LLP, said Judge Chhabria's opinion underscored the difficulties plaintiffs face in pursuing legal action against AI companies for using their works to develop new technologies.
"The plaintiffs have to go back to the drawing board in the next case or in the current cases that don't have decisions yet and beef up their theories about how there is a market out there for AI developers to obtain their materials lawfully," she said.
Less than a week after Judge Chhabria's decision, another group of authors sued OpenAI and Microsoft — a large financial backer — in California federal court, contending that their works were unlawfully used to train ChatGPT, but this time the complaint focuses on alleged piracy. They are represented by many of the same attorneys in the complaint against Meta.
The cases are Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC, case number 3:24-cv-05417, and Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. et al., case number 3:23-cv-03417, both in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al. v. Ross Intelligence Inc.
Before the decisions in the Anthropic and Meta cases, a Delaware federal court issued a highly anticipated opinion in another AI suit, this one involving allegations tech startup Ross Intelligence Inc. infringed material from Thomson Reuters' Westlaw platform to create a competing legal research tool.
Although the case does not involve generative AI products, such as those from Anthropic and Meta, it raises a central issue relevant to other complaints faced by AI developers: whether utilizing copyrighted material for training AI systems constitutes fair use.
U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, overseeing the matter by designation from the Third Circuit, in February was unpersuaded by all of Ross Intelligence's possible defenses against infringement, including fair use. The judge largely granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters on direct copyright infringement, but said unresolved questions about the potential expiration of some of Thomson Reuters' copyrights should be addressed at trial.
Meanwhile, the Third Circuit has granted the tech company an interlocutory appeal, taking up two questions: whether the Westlaw material it used to train its legal research platform is original enough to be protected by copyright, and whether its use of that content is fair use.
Mark McKenna, a partner at Lex Lumina PLLC, said the question regarding the level of creativity required to make Westlaw's headnotes — summaries of judicial opinions — copyrightable is more intriguing than the fair use issue.
"What was notable about the findings in that case is that Judge Bibas, in a very detailed, fact-specific way, found that a bunch of the headnotes were not really closely verbatim of the text of the opinions, which is to say that the summaries had at least some degree of creativity," said McKenna, who is also a professor at the UCLA School of Law's Institute for Technology, Law & Policy and dean of faculty and intellectual life.
To train its competing legal research platform, the tech company created "bulk memos," or compilations of legal questions and answers derived from Westlaw headnotes. Even if the Third Circuit finds that the Westlaw headnotes are copyrightable, it may still find the scope of protection to be "thin," said Anna Chauvet, partner at Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner LLP.
"There are only so many ways to explain a legal doctrine accurately. If so, other works — including Ross's 'Bulk Memos' — can resemble the original closely without infringing if they do not copy the precise expressive elements," she said.
The case is Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al. v. Ross Intelligence Inc., case number 1:20-cv-00613, in U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware.
Romanova v. Amilus Inc.
U.S. Circuit Judge Pierre Leval, credited with introducing the concept of transformativeness in a 1990 Harvard Law Review article, provided a primer on fair use for today's times in a May opinion that said a New York federal judge misapplied the copyright principle that can justify copying.
In a published opinion for a Second Circuit panel, Judge Leval said U.S. District Judge Valerie E. Caproni erred in dismissing a photographer's lawsuit against a website for unauthorized use of one of her images, noting that the defendant's reproduction lacked any new expression, meaning or message, and that there was no justification for the copying.
In a September 2017 issue of National Geographic, photographer Jana Romanova published a photo of a Russian woman with two snakes wrapped around her for an article titled "Intimate Photos of People and Their Beloved Pet Snakes." Amilus, which operates a site called American Illustration and American Photography, republished Romanova's image a few months later for an article titled "Trending: Dogs, Cats ... and Other Pets, to Start Off 2018."
Dori Hanswirth, a partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, said she considers Judge Leval the best authority on fair use.
"So when he comes out with a fair use opinion, it's always very important, and this is a very important opinion, because he is taking the teachings from the Supreme Court in the about transformative use, and he's applying them here," she said. The justices held 7-2 in the 2023 decision that a silkscreen of music icon Prince that Warhol created based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith was not fair use, because both works shared the same commercial purpose of magazine publishing.
Judge Leval's findings are applicable to the complaints from content creators against AI developers, according to Angela Dunning, a partner at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP who is part of the group of attorneys representing Meta in the copyright complaint from authors. She was not speaking directly about the case she's involved in.
"We have seen arguments from some AI plaintiffs that to be a transformative fair use, a secondary use must comment on or criticize the original work, and Judge Leval acknowledges that that is one kind of transformational use, but of course he goes on to enumerate other kinds of transformative uses," she said, including providing "valuable information on any subject of public interest and rendering a valuable service to the public."
"And of course, furnishing valuable information on a subject of public interest was the justification he described in []," Dunning said, referring to a seminal 2015 decision Judge Leval authored. "Google was, through its wholesale copying of millions of copyrighted books, providing not the content of the books themselves, but information about those books."
The case is Romanova v. Amilus Inc., case number 23-828, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Sound and Color LLC v. Samuel Smith et al.
The Ninth Circuit revived a copyright complaint in April against pop stars Sam Smith and Normani over their song, "Dancing With a Stranger," saying a jury could find that the hook from their 2019 hit shares some protectable elements found in a 2015 track called "Dancing With Strangers."
The unpublished opinion from a three-judge panel reversed a summary judgment ruling from a California federal court that the songs were not substantially similar.
The dispute highlights how challenging it can be for courts to distinguish between infringement and the use of common musical themes, according to Jordan Feirman of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, who said music has a centuries-old tradition of building upon existing phrases and musical features.
"So to know whether one musical work is really infringing another or is just exploiting common musical themes, common melodies or intervals between notes or certain rhythms is really difficult, and I think courts struggle with that," he said.
Smith and Normani asked for a rehearing from the full Ninth Circuit, but the appeals court denied the request last month.
The case is Sound and Color LLC v. Samuel Smith et al., case number 23-2680, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Gregorini v. Apple Inc. et al. and Buck G. Woodall v. The Walt Disney Co. et al.
Copyright disputes, especially those involving big names, do not often go to trial, but there have already been two major verdicts this year.
In January, California federal jurors M. Night Shyamalan regarding accusations that the director and others stole an independent filmmaker's work to create the Apple TV+ show "Servant." Then in March, another California federal jury concluded that a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Co. did not rip off an animation artist's Polynesian adventure epic to create the 2016 blockbuster movie "Moana."
In each case, the jurors determined that the defendants did not have prior access to the plaintiffs' material before making the show and movie. Because of that, the juries did not have to consider whether Apple's show or Disney's movie were substantially similar to the plaintiffs' works.
The fact that juries made quick work on the threshold issue of access in two trials shows that "the basics matter," especially in the internet age, said Bulger of ArentFox.
"These cases serve as a reminder to plaintiffs that theories of access have to be more than 'mere speculation or conjecture,'" she said. "And, for defendants, strategic motion practice where works are not strikingly similar — and where facts fail to suggest a reasonable possibility that a defendant viewed a work — could save time and expenses relating to litigation."
The cases are Gregorini v. Apple Inc. et al., case number 2:20-cv-00406, and Buck G. Woodall v. The Walt Disney Co. et al., case number 2:20-cv-03772, both in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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