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  • Sources: 32
  • Relationships: 27
  • Research debt items: 5

Copyright and Generative AI

Summary

U.S. copyright law is being applied to generative AI along two tracks. Outputs: courts and the Copyright Office currently treat purely machine-determined expression as uncopyrightable. Inputs: district courts have split on whether copying works to train models is fair use, and they have distinguished pirated acquisition, competing non-generative tools, and news-output substitution.

Verified Facts

  • Copyright protection under U.S. law for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research is limited by the four fair-use factors in 17 U.S.C. § 107.1
  • The Copyright Office’s March 16, 2023 registration guidance states that copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity, that applicants must disclose more-than-de-minimis AI-generated content, and that when AI determines the expressive elements of an output, that material is not protected by copyright.2
  • The same guidance states that humans may claim copyright in their own contributions, including creative selection, coordination, and arrangement of AI-generated material or sufficiently creative modifications, and that applicants should not list an AI system as author merely because they used it.2
  • The Office’s January 2025 copyrightability report concluded that existing law can resolve AI copyrightability questions without legislative change; that purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable; that prompts alone do not provide sufficient control on current generally available technology; and that the case has not been made for sui generis protection of AI-generated content.3
  • In Thaler v. Perlmutter, the D.C. Circuit held that the Copyright Act requires eligible works to be authored in the first instance by a human being and affirmed refusal to register an image listed as authored solely by a generative system.4
  • In Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, the District of Delaware rejected fair use for a competing non-generative legal-research AI trained on Westlaw headnotes.5
  • In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, the Northern District of California held that training Claude on books was transformative fair use but that a permanent library of pirated copies was not excused as fair use; a $1.5 billion class settlement of the piracy claims received final approval on July 20, 2026.67
  • In Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., the Northern District of California granted Meta summary judgment on fair use for training Llama on thirteen authors’ books on that record, while warning that market-dilution evidence could change the result in other cases and leaving torrenting-distribution claims open.8
  • In The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corp., the Southern District of New York in April 2025 largely denied motions to dismiss publisher copyright claims against OpenAI and Microsoft; an August 2026 order later dismissed material-contribution contributory claims premised on alleged end-user infringement.9
  • In re OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation centralized author and publisher actions in MDL No. 3143. On October 27, 2025, the court denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss author class claims based on alleged ChatGPT outputs, holding some alleged summaries and sequel outlines could be substantially similar, without deciding fair use.2223
  • In Dow Jones & Co. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., the Southern District of New York on August 21, 2025 denied Perplexity’s motion to dismiss a news-publisher copyright and trademark action over its answer engine for lack of personal jurisdiction and improper venue; a later Times action against Perplexity was filed in the same district.24
  • In Spyder Games LLC v. Mementum Lab, game studios seek a declaration that AI-generated “brainrot” meme characters are not copyrightable. See Brain Rot and AI-Generated Meme Characters.10
  • Music-industry suits are collected in Music Copyright and Generative AI: labels allege unlicensed copying of sound recordings to train Suno and Udio; publishers allege lyric copying in Concord v. Anthropic (including a later torrenting complaint, Concord II), BMG v. Anthropic, and the later Sony/Warner publisher action against Anthropic; and GEMA v. OpenAI is a non-final German first-instance judgment that memorized lyrics in models 4 and 4o were unauthorized reproductions.11121314152526
  • Image-generator suits now have dedicated pages. Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. is a pending U.S. artists’ class action in which Copyright Act claims survived dismissal and DMCA claims did not.16 Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Midjourney, Inc. is pending studio litigation over alleged character outputs, later consolidated with a Warner Bros. Discovery action.1718 Getty Images v. Stability AI is an English trial judgment that dismissed Getty’s remaining secondary-copyright theory after Getty abandoned UK training and output copyright claims; a later Northern District of California action dismissed a false-CMI claim without prejudice while trademark and UCL claims survived.192728
  • Kneschke v. LAION is a German photographer’s claim against a nonprofit dataset publisher: Landgericht Hamburg dismissed the complaint, applying the scientific-research TDM exception, and the Higher Regional Court affirmed, also applying the general TDM exception as reported.2930
  • In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation is a Northern District of California putative class action; a September 11, 2025 order dismissed with prejudice claims as to specified models and vicarious claims against Alphabet, leaving Bard, Gemini, Imagen, and related model claims.31
  • Doe 1 v. GitHub, Inc. is the leading open-source Copilot action: the district court dismissed DMCA § 1202(b) claims with prejudice and allowed open-source-license contract claims; a Ninth Circuit interlocutory appeal was argued February 11, 2026.2021

Historical Context

Software copyright already had a fair-use landmark in Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc., which treated copying of Java API declaring code as transformative fair use. Generative-AI cases cite Google v. Oracle but present a different use: ingesting expressive works at scale to produce competing text, images, or music. No U.S. court of appeals had, as of the sources reviewed here, issued a merits holding that LLM training on copyrighted books is or is not fair use.

Three questions should be kept separate.

Authorship of outputs. Thaler and Copyright Office practice answer the easy case: a work with no human author cannot be registered or owned as copyrighted expression.234 Mixed works remain a case-by-case inquiry. Spyder tests whether viral meme characters created with image generators fall on the uncopyrightable side of that line.10

Copying for training (inputs). Fair use under § 107 is fact-specific.1 Ross involved a substitute legal-research tool, not a generative writer.5 Bartz treated generative training as transformative but piracy-for-library as infringement.6 Kadrey treated generative training as fair use on a thin market-harm record while saying other records may come out the other way.8 Publisher cases such as the Times action add output-substitution and secondary-liability theories that book-training summary judgments did not decide.9 The OpenAI MDL’s October 2025 order adds that alleged ChatGPT summaries of books can survive a substantial-similarity challenge at the pleading stage, still without a fair-use holding.23 Perplexity is a retrieval-augmented answer-engine docket, not a closed-corpus training fair-use ruling.24 Image cases add a further split: Andersen’s training-copy claims are pending in the United States,16 Getty’s English trial never reached a UK-training holding because that claim was abandoned and the remaining model-as-infringing-copy theory failed,19 and Getty’s U.S. action remains at pleadings after a false-CMI dismissal.28 Kneschke is German TDM law about downloading an image to compile an open dataset, not a holding that commercial model training is always lawful.2930 Google’s generative-AI class action shows courts requiring model-by-model factual allegations connecting datasets to works.31 Music cases add another split: sound-recording training claims against Suno and Udio remain without a U.S. fair-use holding, while GEMA is a non-final German holding that lyric memorization is reproduction outside the TDM exception.111214 Open-source code is on a different track in Doe: DMCA CMI claims were dismissed and license-contract claims remain, with the CMI identicality question in the Ninth Circuit.2021

Remedies and settlements. Bartz’s $1.5 billion settlement prices past pirated acquisition for a defined class; it does not freeze the fair-use doctrine or release output claims.7

Non-copyright AI suits (chatbot product liability, defamation, user-harm) are collected in Chatbot Product Liability and User-Harm Litigation and inventoried from AI Litigation Landscape.

Relationships

  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT cites SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-KADREY-V-META.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-NYT-V-OPENAI.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to TOPIC-AI-MUSIC-COPYRIGHT.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-UMG-V-SUNO.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-UMG-V-UDIO.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-GEMA-V-OPENAI.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to STAT-USC-107.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to TOPIC-BRAIN-ROT.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-GOOGLE-V-ORACLE.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to PERSON-KIT-WALSH.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-GETTY-V-STABILITY.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-SONY-V-ANTHROPIC.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-IN-RE-OPENAI.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-KNESCHKE-V-LAION.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-IN-RE-GOOGLE-GEN-AI.
  • TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT related_to CASE-BMG-V-ANTHROPIC.

Sources

  1. SRC-USC-17-107-LII: 17 U.S.C. § 107.
  2. SRC-USCO-AI-REGISTRATION-GUIDANCE-2023: Copyright Office AI registration guidance (2023).
  3. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025: Copyright Office AI copyrightability report, Part 2 (2025).
  4. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC: Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).
  5. SRC-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS-2025: Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence (D. Del. 2025).
  6. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FAIR-USE: Bartz v. Anthropic, Order on Fair Use (2025).
  7. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FINAL-APPROVAL: Bartz settlement final approval (2026).
  8. SRC-KADREY-V-META-FAIR-USE: Kadrey v. Meta (N.D. Cal. 2025).
  9. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-MTD-2025: Times v. Microsoft/OpenAI MTD opinion (2025).
  10. SRC-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM-COMPLAINT: Spyder Games v. Mementum complaint (2025).
  11. SRC-UMG-V-SUNO-COMPLAINT: UMG v. Suno complaint (2024).
  12. SRC-UMG-V-UDIO-COMPLAINT: UMG v. Udio complaint (2024).
  13. SRC-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC-MTD-2025: Concord v. Anthropic MTD denial (2025).
  14. SRC-GEMA-V-OPENAI-LG-MUENCHEN-2025: GEMA v. OpenAI, LG München I (2025).
  15. SRC-SONY-V-ANTHROPIC-COMPLAINT-2026: Sony/Warner publisher complaint against Anthropic (2026).
  16. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-MTD-2024: Andersen MTD order (2024).
  17. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-COMPLAINT: Disney/Universal complaint (2025).
  18. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-MTC-2026: Disney discovery order (2026).
  19. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-EWHC-2025: Getty Images v. Stability AI [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch).
  20. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-MTD-2024: Doe v. GitHub MTD order (2024).
  21. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-9THCIR-DOCKET: Doe v. GitHub Ninth Circuit docket (24-7700).
  22. SRC-JPML-OPENAI-MDL-3143: JPML Transfer Order, MDL No. 3143.
  23. SRC-IN-RE-OPENAI-OUTPUT-MTD-2025: In re OpenAI output-claim MTD opinion (2025).
  24. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-MTD-2025: Dow Jones v. Perplexity MTD opinion (2025).
  25. SRC-CONCORD-II-COMPLAINT: Concord II complaint (2026).
  26. SRC-BMG-V-ANTHROPIC-COMPLAINT: BMG v. Anthropic complaint (2026).
  27. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-US-COMPLAINT: Getty U.S. complaint (2025).
  28. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-US-MTD-2026: Getty U.S. MTD order (2026).
  29. SRC-KNESCHKE-LG-HAMBURG-2024: Kneschke LG Hamburg (2024).
  30. SRC-KNESCHKE-OLG-HAMBURG-2025: Kneschke OLG Hamburg (2025).
  31. SRC-GOOGLE-GEN-AI-MTD-2025: In re Google Generative AI MTD order (2025).

Additional sources (not yet cited in footnotes):

Research Debt

  • Add Copyright Office Part 3 (training) when a final version is cited from copyright.gov rather than secondary summaries.
  • Document U.S. Copyright Office registration examples beyond Thaler (Zarya of the Dawn; later granted mixed-work registrations).
  • Music-generator and lyric cases now have dedicated pages; add later U.S. fair-use orders and any OLG München appeal in GEMA there.
  • Add any Ninth Circuit opinion in Doe v. GitHub.
  • Add any BGH judgment in Kneschke from that official text.

Document metadata

  • Last verified: 2026-09-02

  1. SRC-USC-17-107-LII — 17 U.S.C. § 107. Primary statutory authority. ↩↩

  2. SRC-USCO-AI-REGISTRATION-GUIDANCE-2023 — 88 Fed. Reg. 16190. Agency guidance. ↩↩↩

  3. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025 — Copyright Office Part 2 report (Jan. 2025). Agency report. ↩↩

  4. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC — 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Primary appellate authority. ↩↩

  5. SRC-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS-2025 — D. Del. Feb. 11, 2025. District-court authority. ↩↩

  6. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FAIR-USE — N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025. District-court authority. ↩↩

  7. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FINAL-APPROVAL — N.D. Cal. July 20, 2026. Settlement approval order. ↩↩

  8. SRC-KADREY-V-META-FAIR-USE — 788 F. Supp. 3d 1026 (N.D. Cal. 2025). District-court authority. ↩↩

  9. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-MTD-2025 — S.D.N.Y. Apr. 4, 2025. Pleading-stage authority. ↩↩

  10. SRC-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM-COMPLAINT — N.D. Cal. Nov. 26, 2025. Pending case; plaintiff allegations. ↩↩

  11. SRC-UMG-V-SUNO-COMPLAINT — D. Mass. June 24, 2024. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩↩

  12. SRC-UMG-V-UDIO-COMPLAINT — S.D.N.Y. June 2024. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩↩

  13. SRC-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC-MTD-2025 — N.D. Cal. Oct. 6, 2025. Pleading-stage order. ↩

  14. SRC-GEMA-V-OPENAI-LG-MUENCHEN-2025 — LG München I Nov. 11, 2025. Non-final first-instance judgment. ↩↩

  15. SRC-SONY-V-ANTHROPIC-COMPLAINT-2026 — N.D. Cal. Aug. 28, 2026. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩

  16. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-MTD-2024 — N.D. Cal. Aug. 12, 2024. Pleading-stage order. ↩↩

  17. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-COMPLAINT — C.D. Cal. June 11, 2025. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩

  18. SRC-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY-MTC-2026 — C.D. Cal. June 15, 2026. Discovery order; records consolidation. ↩

  19. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-EWHC-2025 — [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch) (4 Nov. 2025). English first-instance judgment. ↩↩

  20. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-MTD-2024 — N.D. Cal. June 24, 2024. Pleading-stage order. ↩↩

  21. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-9THCIR-DOCKET — 9th Cir. No. 24-7700. Appellate docket; argued Feb. 11, 2026. ↩↩

  22. SRC-JPML-OPENAI-MDL-3143 — JPML Transfer Order, MDL No. 3143. ↩

  23. SRC-IN-RE-OPENAI-OUTPUT-MTD-2025 — S.D.N.Y. Oct. 27, 2025. Pleading-stage authority on author-class outputs. ↩↩

  24. SRC-DOW-JONES-V-PERPLEXITY-MTD-2025 — S.D.N.Y. Aug. 21, 2025. Jurisdiction, venue, and later-registered works. ↩↩

  25. SRC-CONCORD-II-COMPLAINT — N.D. Cal. Jan. 28, 2026. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩

  26. SRC-BMG-V-ANTHROPIC-COMPLAINT — N.D. Cal. Mar. 17, 2026. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩

  27. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-US-COMPLAINT — N.D. Cal. Aug. 14, 2025. Pending; plaintiff allegations. ↩

  28. SRC-GETTY-V-STABILITY-US-MTD-2026 — N.D. Cal. Apr. 23, 2026. Pleading-stage order on CMI, trademark, and UCL. ↩↩

  29. SRC-KNESCHKE-LG-HAMBURG-2024 — LG Hamburg, 310 O 227/23 (Sept. 27, 2024). ↩↩

  30. SRC-KNESCHKE-OLG-HAMBURG-2025 — OLG Hamburg, 5 U 104/24 (Dec. 10, 2025). Appellate report. ↩↩

  31. SRC-GOOGLE-GEN-AI-MTD-2025 — N.D. Cal. Sept. 11, 2025. Pleading-stage order. ↩↩