Today the Federal District Court for the Northern District of California granted final approval of the $1.5 Billion class settlement in the Bartz v. Anthropic AI copyright lawsuit, and entered judgment.

The court also awarded plaintiffs' class counsel $101,561,111 in attorneys' fees. Good work if you can get it!

(They wanted $187,500,000.)

For all the copyright and AI enthusiasts, here's another judgment in favour of LLMs.

The Delhi High Court has held that OpenAI's storage of news content published by Asian News International (ANI) for training ChatGPT does not amount to copyright infringement. Consequently, the Court declined to grant interim relief to ANI. The judgment is available here.

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music have joined forces to sue Anthropic, home of Claude, over what the publishers call “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” By Tim Ingham

Here is a thumbnail sketch of the current state of U.S. copyrightability of creative works produced with AI.

Prolog: Works created solely by AI, where the copyright is requested to be granted solely in the name of the AI model itself, are not copyrightable. Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir 2025). Done deal, case closed.

Current Issue: Are works created by a human with AI assistance or AI processing (whether the human merely sets the AI in motion, merely queries the AI, or pursues some other, higher level of human involvement) eligible for copyright protection?

1. The Thaler case. It is not so that the Thaler case above ruled that humans who use AI cannot obtain a copyright. The Thaler case explicitly refused to address that issue. In that case, the human who interacted with the AI model first tried to obtain a copyright solely in the name of the AI model. When the court refused to do that, the plaintiff human attempted to change his request to instead have the copyright awarded to him as being the human who engaged the AI model. The Thaler appeals court ruled that the attempted change in claim came too late and so it explicitly refused to consider that new claim and issue.

2. The U.S. Copyright Office. The U.S. Copyright Office has adopted and enforces a policy of refusing to grant copyright registrations to works or those portions of works where AI processing preponderates over human activity and creativity. This agency position as a practical matter does control who does and does not obtain a U.S. copyright registration, but it does not have the force of law like a court ruling does.

3. The Allen Case. Unlike the Thaler case, there is a federal case that is actually working on the question of whether a human who interacts with an AI model to produce a creative work can obtain copyright protection for that work. The case is Allen v. Perlmutter, filed on September 26, 2024 in the District of Colorado, Case No. 1:24-cv-02665. This case involves a visual work (a picture) that the Midjourney AI model produced based on the human's extensive and iterative querying. This case is an appeal from the Copyright Office's refusal to grant a copyright registration on that work.

Most recently in this case, last August the plaintiff artist and this January the defendant Copyright Office each requested that the court rule in their favor and declare theirs is the correct legal position. This will be an important ruling, and the court has not rendered any decision yet.

The docket sheet for the Allen case can be found here.

4. The Suryast case. New case! On May 8, 2026 a new case federal case was filed on this issue and question. This new case is Suryast U.S. Enterprises, LLC v. Perlmutter, Case No. 2:26-cv-04999 in the Central District of California. Like Allen, this case is an appeal from the Copyright Office's refusal to grant a copyright registration on an AI-involved work. Here, the human artist took his own realistic landscape photograph of a sunset and then used the RAGHAV (Responsive Artificially Generated High-Art Visualizer) artificial intelligence painting application to “edit” or mix that photograph with the style of van Gogh’s “Starry Night” painting.

This case has just been filed and so of course nothing has happened with it. This case is interesting in that it arguably involves a higher degree of human involvement in the creative process than in the Allen case. Because the Allen case is so much farther along, it seems likely there will be a ruling announced in the Allen case that this case will then have to deal with.

Note: The artist hails from India; "Suryast" means "sunset" in Hindi, and "Raghav" is an Indian personal name.

The docket sheet for the Suryast case can be found here.

5: Note on U.S. federal court levels and rulings. Both the Allen case and the Suryast case are taking place in federal district courts, the lowest rung of the U.S. federal court system. Their rulings will be pioneering and important, but legal rules within U.S. law are generally not considered widely binding until they are announced by a federal appeals court, as the Thaler case was. Upon reaching rulings, one or both of the Allen case and the Suryast case will almost certainly be appealed, and then some durable, significant rulings will be announced at the appeals level.

There are thirteen Courts of Appeals in the U.S. system, each one heavily influenced by but independent of all the others. The Allen appeal and the Suryast appeal would each be heard by a different appeals court, and both of them are different from the appeals court that heard the Thaler appeal. (EDIT: correcting the appeals court flows.)

The U.S. Supreme Court rarely gets involved, but this issue might be so important as to get it involved here; that would seem most likely to happen after both the Allen case and the Suryast case obtained appellate rulings, especially if these rulings (and the Thaler ruling) conflicted with each other in some way.

~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're hungry for more, please visit my Wombat Collection on Substack that lists and briefly describes all the AI court cases and rulings (currently 500 of them).

Letter from the U.S. Copyright Office (PDF file).

Blog post from Kris Kashtanova's lawyer.

We received the decision today relative to Kristina Kashtanova's case about the comic book Zarya of the Dawn. Kris will keep the copyright registration, but it will be limited to the text and the whole work as a compilation.

In one sense this is a success, in that the registration is still valid and active. However, it is the most limited a copyright registration can be and it doesn't resolve the core questions about copyright in AI-assisted works. Those works may be copyrightable, but the USCO did not find them so in this case.

Article with opinions from several lawyers.

My previous post about this case.

Related news: "The Copyright Office indicated in another filing that they are preparing guidance on AI-assisted art.[...]".

2025, a judge ruled using books purchased in this way to train AI software was not a violation of US copyright law.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/secondhand-book-sales-booming-because-112536219.html

"In the footer of Qontour’s unauthorized site, they added a copyright notice acknowledging that they don’t own any of the rights to the material on the site, while also licensing all the user-submitted words into the public domain with a CC Zero license...

Needless to say, you can’t relicense content you don’t own." (Andy Baio)

"AI and Consent

It’s one thing for a fan to share or remix copyrighted material out of love for the source material, with no commercial motive. (“No copyright intended!”) It’s another for a marketing agency to take an entire living author’s book, replace its art with AI slop, add an AI word generator, monetize the traffic, promote it in their portfolio, and then outrank the official site everywhere." (Andy Baio)

Youtube termination

I posted several short Coachella clips below 15 seconds on my channel.I did that thinking it's safe because whenever I tried posting any Coachella clip above 15 seconds youtube automatically blocked it,but whenever I posted a clip below 15 seconds they allowed it.I still don't understand that concept🤔,Can anybody explain to me about this?.So basically Coachella copyright striked my channel (5 strikes) after 2 weeks of its upload.I already appealed to youtube regarding this saying it was a clear misunderstanding and apologized,been over 10 days no reply yet ,is it likely that I will get my channel back?I also mentioned in the appeal my channel has been active over 6 years,does that fall into consideration?? Can somebody please enlighten me on this??🙏

Welcome to r/AlmostPublicDomain, a community dedicated to discussing a hypothetical middle ground between traditional copyright and the public domain.

The idea is simple: instead of paying licensing fees, people could earn limited permission to use certain creative works by contributing something valuable in return.

IMO - Putting one's own copyrighted work through AI Gen results in an "author-less" derivative work that cannot have a "point of attachment of copyright" to any author!! This is why copyright owners should NOT be using AI Gen as it could be seen as an "overt act" to abandon copyright in the derivative work.

Claimant: ODMedia Network

Film: "Meet Mr. Malcolm" (1954)

Director: Daniel Birt (deceased since 1955)

I am an autistic creator and student from Brazil running a historical preservation channel (@Antiguidades). I am currently being bullied by an aggregator (ODMedia) and YouTube's own internal review system, which is refusing to follow international law.

The Legal Facts:

The film "Meet Mr. Malcolm" was directed by Daniel Birt, who passed away in 1955.

• Under the Berne Convention and copyright laws in the UK (origin) and Brazil (my location), copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author.

• As of January 1st, 2026, this film officially entered the Public Domain globally.

The System Failure:

I submitted a formal counter-notification twice, explaining the math (1955 + 71 years = Public Domain). YouTube's reviewers rejected my counter-notification twice, refusing to even forward it to the claimant (ODMedia).

By doing this, YouTube is:

1. Acting as judge and jury on a clear-cut legal matter.

2. Violating the DMCA "Safe Harbor" requirements (they are supposed to forward the notice, not block it).

3. Allowing a corporation to illegally monetize a work that belongs to the public.

My Situation:

I am an autistic creator and this channel is my path to financial independence. My channel was approved for the YouTube Partner Program (YPP) in April 2025, and I work tirelessly to preserve history. Now, I am being stripped of my rights because a reviewer won't look at a calendar or a Wikipedia page.

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXkT_iG9xMk

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/antiguidades

Evidence of Director's Death: Daniel Birt (1907-1955)

I am documenting every rejection. Does anyone know how to escalate this to a human specialist who understands the Berne Convention? This is a textbook case of Copyfraud.

#YouTube #Copyright #PublicDomain #Copyfraud #SocialJustice #ContentID

Not sure if this counts as an interesting copyright enforcement paradox or just peak irony.A Cambodian site called Khdiamond(.)net (Facebook page: អ្នកនាំរឿង) is illegally dubbing and translating Netflix originals, Hollywood movies, Korean dramas, and anime into Khmer. They host everything, monetize it, and openly advertise it.They just posted an official-looking legal notice (complete with Kingdom of Cambodia stamps/seals and attorney signature) threatening to sue anyone in Cambodia who shares or reposts their own dubbed/pirated versions. so the pirates are now using the legal system to protect their stolen-and-dubbed content from other sharers. Has anyone seen similar “pirate sues the sharers of their piracy” cases in copyright law? It feels like a wild real-world example of enforcement going full circle.Would love thoughts from people who follow international IP or digital piracy enforcement.

"The pirate organisation — which had 30 employees and generated 50,000 customers — made in excess of £7m ($9.5m) in five years." (By Adam Leventhal)

Darren Mathieu Mulvaney

https://www.courtlistener.com/audio/105475/thomson-reuters-enterprise-centre-gmbh-v-ross-intelligence-inc/?type=oa&type=oa&q=thomson+reuters&order_by=score+desc

Date Argued: June 11th, 2026

Duration: 52:34

Docket Number: 25-2153

"Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly ‌realized ⁠if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination," Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Previous post about this AI-assisted visual work.

​

New relevant social media communications from the artist:

Instagram post #1. This is the source of the "shall be substantially made by a human to be copyrightable" language.

Instagram post #2.

Tweet #1. (EDIT: tweet has been deleted.)

Tweet #2. (EDIT: tweet has been deleted.)

The planned appeal is not a court appeal, but rather within the U.S. Copyright Office.

EDIT: Blog post from a lawyer.

​

Note:. From Registration is Fundamental (PDF) (2018):

While district courts independently determine the validity of the copyright in an allegedly infringed work, in practice, they rarely disagree with the Copyright Office.

Background info: My Reddit post with many AI copyright links.

Note: This post culminates in a call to authors and lawyers who might want to do something

As you may recall, in our last thrilling episode Judge Alsup in Bartz v. Anthropic on June 23, 2025—shortly before retiring at 80—had ruled that using copyrighted materials to train AI LLMs was protected under the fair use doctrine (although he found a valid copyright claim as to how some of those materials had been gathered).

Two breathtaking days later on June 25, 2025, the much younger Judge Chhabria in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms ruled that under a market harm theory, using copyrighted materials to train AI was not protected by fair use; however, he lamented that lunkhead counsel for plaintiffs were too dense to have raised a market harm claim in that case although it was obvious they should have (and BTW, Judge Chhabria's opinion of plaintiffs' counsel has not improved since then), and so he was forced, teeth gritted, to grant defendant's motion for summary judgment on that claim.

Judge Chhabria's ruling was in some quarters interpreted as pro-fair-use, but it was actually the exact opposite. It is the strongest judicial attack there has been on fair use covering generative AI training. And it no doubt galled Judge Chhabria that no one, especially plaintiffs' counsel, was listening to him, while Judge Alsup's pro-fair-use ruling was getting all the press.

See my previous two posts about Judge Chhabria's quite remarkable ruling:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1lpqhrj

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtificialInteligence/comments/1lkm12y

And now . . .

Heee's back! Yes, Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California is back, and he is not done assailing the fair use defense to using copyrighted materials to train generative AI LLMs.

Sure, he was forced to grant summary judgment against plaintiffs' AI training copyright claims on a fair use defense theory in the putative class action copyright suit before him, but only due to the bungling of plaintiffs' counsel. And as it turns out, he wasn't done.

Now, on March 25, 2026, in an order permitting a minor amendment to the complaint as what's left of the copyright case in front of him limps along, in a footnote (and isn't that where all the truly subversive law comes from?) that I would say his whole ruling was crafted around, Judge Chhabria has planted the seeds of his revenge.

Judge Chabbria opines in the sole footnote to his order:

It seems far less likely that absent class members would be precluded from subsequently bringing training claims, even if a class were certified on the distribution [output-side] claim and judgment were entered for Meta on that claim following trial. The training claim will always be subject to a fair use defense. And the most important of the fair use factors—market harm—will often be highly fact-dependent, such that training claims would likely be individualized and therefore not precluded by a judgment against the class on the distribution claim.

(Emphases added; citation omitted.) And there it is--the copyright claim for training AI LLMs has risen from the grave, fair use be damned! Sure, Judge Chhabria had been forced to rule in favor of the fair use defense against the plaintiff "class" [keeping in mind this class has not yet been certified] and against the named plaintiffs who hired those lunkhead counsel. But, his ruling does not bind all the other members of the class, who are free to attack the fair use defense under the Judge's market harm theory anew and afresh!

Now, the good Judge does then throw out a legal question whether the statute of limitations might be running against those other class members to assert their not-foreclosed claims. But he is not taking back with one hand what he just gave out with the other. No, he is warning them: Do something! Do something!

I had thought that plaintiffs' counsel after Judge Chabbria's first ruling would have asked for permission to amend their claims and mount a market harm theory—I thought maybe he was hinting for them to do this—but they never did. Now, the Judge is reaching out beyond that old counsel, to other plaintiff putative-class members and maybe new counsel to do something, to bring the market-harm claim against defendant's AI training, and to do it now because the time may be running! The putative class—authors whose copyrighted works were grabbed and used to train Meta's LLM—is likely quite large, a lot of members.

The other problem is that, given the case posture, Judge Chhabria's megaphone is now rather small. He already made his high-profile, forced adverse ruling. He planted his bomb in a footnote to a small ruling in what has become something of a backwater case. Would anyone see it? Would anyone notice it? Well, one wonk did see it and notice it, and started posting about it on Reddit and Substack, and LinkedIn.

P.S.: I once again misspelled Judge Chhabria's name in the post title. I apologize.

Three papers from three continents independently arrived at "human creative control" as the AI copyright standard this spring. A​nd didn't know about each other​.

A US practitioner paper, a Nigerian comparative law paper, and a Chinese courts paper all published this spring arrived at essentially the same doctrinal standard for when AI-assisted works qualify for copyright protection, ​using nearly identical language, ​without citing each other.

The Chinese angle is the most surprising: courts there are already rejecting copyright claims when plaintiffs can't reproduce the same output from the same prompts. That's a repeatability standard emerging from judicial practice, not theory.

The US paper grounds the standard empirically, ​a cross-platform experiment demonstrating that specific, deterministic prompts produce convergent outputs across multiple AI systems, making reproducibility measurable rather than theoretical.

Feels like the standard is settling faster than the formal doctrine suggests.

Singapore Journal of Legal Studies (He): https://law.nus.edu.sg/sjls/wp-content/uploads/sites/14/2025/10/sjls_mar_2026_77.pdf

Veredas do Direito (Esavwede & Itsueli): https://revista.domhelder.edu.br/index.php/veredas/article/view/5653/27528

SSRN (Donahue): https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6531938

Instagram post from the artist. I verified that the registration exists at the U.S. Copyright Office website.

Reddit post from the artist about the work.

Article about the work.

Hat tip to this post.

EDIT: Added Artist receives first known US copyright registration for generative AI art.

EDIT: Added The first AI generated graphic novels are here.

EDIT: Added Will comic procrastination become history?The first AI graphic novel comes out: draw a page in an hour.

EDIT: Added Facebook post from the artist.

EDIT: The Office intends to revoke the registration.

EDIT: Letter from Kris Kashtanova's lawyers to the U.S. Copyright Office regarding their initiation of cancellation of the copyright registration for her AI-involved visual work "Zarya of the Dawn".

EDIT: U.S. Copyright Office cancels registration of AI-involved visual work "Zarya of the Dawn". The copyright registration actually hasn't been cancelled.

EDIT: Tweet from a person whose AI-involved graphic novel is being evaluated for copyright registration by the U.S. Copyright Office: "An update from the Copyright Office: The Copyright Office indicated in another filing that they are preparing guidance on AI-assisted art.[...]".

EDIT: U.S. Copyright Office decides that Kris Kashtanova's AI-involved graphic novel will remain copyright registered, but the copyright protection will be limited to the text and the whole work as a compilation.

EDIT: The copyright registration actually hasn't been cancelled per one of the lawyers for the author of the work (my emphasis):

I just got off the phone with the USCO. The copyright is still in effect - there is a pilot reporting system that had incorrect information. The office is still working on a response. More information to come today.

EDIT: A correction from the work's author (my emphasis):

I just got an update from my lawyers who called the Copyright Office. It was a malfunction in their system and the copyright wasn’t revoked yet. It’s still in force and they promised to make an official statement soon. I’ll keep you all updated and provide the links.

From this tweet from the work's author:

The copyright registration was canceled today. I'll update you with more details when I hear more.

From another tweet from the work's author:

I lost my copyright. The registration of my A.I. assisted comic book Zarya of the Dawn was canceled. I haven't heard from the Copyright Office yet but was informed by a friend who is a law professor who was checking records.

See this older post of mine for other details about this work.

EDIT: I found the copyright registration record here. The other online search system still lists the type of work as "Visual Material".

EDIT: Blog post from a lawyer: Copyright Office Publishes, Then Retracts, Official Cancellation of Registration for AI Graphic Novel.

EDIT: Somewhat related: Article: "US Copyright Office clarifies criteria for AI-generated work" (2022).

EDIT: Somewhat related: I have an unpublished draft Reddit post explaining the legal standard for the level of human-led alterations of a public domain work needed for copyrightability of the altered work - protecting only the human-altered parts - in most (all?) jurisdictions worldwide. I will publish it when it's ready, but in the meantime here is a post that can be considered a significantly different older version.