Tag: copyright laws

Warner Bros. DMCA Takedowns Hit Lanterns Spoiler Discussion

Warner Bros. Discovery has been using DMCA copyright takedowns to remove posts on social media that contained just discussions about the first episode of the HBO series Lanterns, a report by Puck said.

The posts in question didn’t contain any leaked stills or footage from the show – just people’s comments about a major plot twist revealed in the first episode, which had previously been rumored and reported on by some outlets.

The series, a DC one co-created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, premiered on Sunday, and its final moments delivered a shocking fate for one of the show’s characters.

Cosmic Book News (this link contains spoilers for Lanterns), an independent pop-culture site run by editor Matt McGloin, had spent months piecing the twist together from casting, promotional footage, and the show’s timeline; by March, McGloin was predicting the ending outright.

Warner Bros. was not happy about this, and went on to use copyright law to remove posts on X, YouTube, and Facebook. The first takedowns happened on July 10, two weeks before Comic-Con, when an anonymous Reddit post claimed to reveal the twist, and it spread to X. An HBO Max social strategist then filed a takedown notice covering six posts from five accounts, including Cosmic Book News, describing the infringement as “people discussing the spoilers of the first episode of Lanterns.”

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Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement in which artificial intelligence company Anthropic will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book after using pirated copies of their works to train its Claude chatbot.

District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said in a Monday ruling that the class-action settlement provides “meaningful relief” to affected authors and publishers.

About 91% of the more than 482,000 books covered by the ruling have been claimed by authors or publishers who are now due payment.

Plaintiff attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement that the settlement was “the largest known copyright recovery in history. We look forward to making distributions to the Class as promptly as possible.”

U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval in San Francisco federal court last September and has since retired. Alsup had dealt the case a mixed ruling last summer, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

Bestselling thriller novelist Andrea Bartz first brought the suit with two other authors in 2024.

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Big Corporations Get Rich From Their Secret Seed Patents — Taxpayers and Farmers Pay the Price

The U.S. is one of only a handful of countries that allows companies to hold patents on plant varieties.

As a result, a small number of corporations can — and do — suppress competition in the seed industry, stifle innovation and turn taxpayer subsidies intended for farmers into corporate profits.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has found that two companies control more than 70% of U.S. corn and soybean seed sales, and the top four cottonseed companies control nearly 94% of that market.

In a May court filing in a legal dispute between two U.S. seed companies, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said patents on seeds are obstructing competition and research in the agriculture industry.

As researchers who work on plant breeding and seed policy, we have seen how that plays out.

When huge companies assert their patents, smaller businesses and public plant breeders, who often lack the legal resources to fight back, are frequently dissuaded from conducting research and development that might actually not be illegal at all.

And a lack of competition allows dominant companies — not always based in the U.S. — to collect large sums of taxpayer money that Congress allocated in hopes it would help farmers, not shareholders’ and executives’ bottom lines.

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Kiwi Farms Challenges DMCA Subpoenas as Tools to Unmask Anonymous Speech

A new lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York offers a clean example of something that keeps happening and keeps getting ignored: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used to censor speech and unmask anonymous speakers.

The case is Lolcow LLC v. Fong-Jones, filed on March 12, 2026, and it pits the operator of the web forum Kiwi Farms against Liz Fong-Jones, an activist and field Chief Technology Officer at SaaS observability platform Honeycomb, who has been filing DMCA subpoenas in an attempt to identify anonymous forum users.

The content Fong-Jones wants censored is a screenshot of a Fong-Jones Bluesky post and an edited version of a Fong-Jones headshot, both related to what Fong-Jones has previously described publicly as a “consent accident.”

Forum users posted and discussed those images. Fong-Jones responded by claiming copyright ownership and filing DMCA subpoenas to force the site to hand over the identities of the people who posted them.

The copyright claims seem thin. Kiwi Farms operator Joshua Moon argues that the screenshot is a derivative work over which Fong-Jones holds no copyright, and that the edited headshot represents a textbook case of fair use, given that the image has no commercial value and was modified specifically for purposes of criticism and commentary.

That argument carries weight. Courts have long recognized that transformative use of images for commentary or ridicule sits comfortably within fair use protections.

What makes this case useful as a case study is less the copyright question itself and more the mechanism being exploited. The DMCA subpoena process, codified in Section 512(h), allows copyright holders to obtain a judicial subpoena to unmask the identities of allegedly infringing anonymous internet users just by asking a court clerk to issue one and attaching a copy of the infringement notice.

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Supreme Court Limits ISPs’ Liability For Online Piracy

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sharply curtailed when internet service providers can be held liable for copyright infringement committed by their subscribers, handing a major victory to broadband companies and dealing a setback to Sony Music Entertainment and other major labels seeking to combat online piracy.

In a 7-2 decision (with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson concurring only in the judgment), the justices ruled that Cox Communications Inc. cannot be held liable for the actions of customers who illegally downloaded and shared songs using its network, even after the company received more than 163,000 infringement notices from copyright holders. The ruling reverses a $1 billion jury verdict against the Atlanta-based cable and internet giant and clarifies long-standing uncertainties about secondary liability under U.S. copyright law.

The case stemmed from a 2018 lawsuit in which the labels accused Cox of willful contributory and vicarious infringement for failing to terminate repeat offenders. A federal jury in Virginia sided with the labels on both theories and awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. The Fourth Circuit upheld the contributory-liability finding but tossed the vicarious-liability verdict, leading to the Supreme Court appeal on the contributory issue alone.

Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said a service provider is liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended its service to be used for that purpose. “The provider of a service is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only if it intended that the provided service be used for infringement, which can be shown only if the party induced the infringement or the provided service is tailored to that infringement,” he wrote.

Such intent exists only when the provider actively induces infringement – such as by marketing a product as a tool for piracy – or offers a service that is “not capable of ‘substantial’ or ‘commercially significant’ noninfringing uses,” the opinion stated, citing the court’s landmark 1984 decision in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios Inc. and the 2005 ruling in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster Ltd. 

“Mere knowledge that a service will be used to infringe is insufficient to establish the required intent to infringe,” Thomas emphasized, rejecting the broader “material contribution” standard applied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

The decision rejects the Fourth Circuit’s holding that Cox could be liable simply by continuing to provide internet service to subscribers whose accounts were linked to repeated violations. “The Fourth Circuit’s holding went beyond the two forms of liability recognized in Grokster and Sony,” the opinion states.

Cox, which serves about six million subscribers, had argued it took reasonable steps to address piracy, including sending warnings, suspending service and terminating accounts after multiple notices. The company contractually prohibits subscribers from using its network for infringing activity. Sony Music Entertainment and other major labels countered that Cox’s efforts were insufficient.

Tuesday’s ruling is expected to have ripple effects across the telecom and entertainment industries – with industry executives long warning that expansive secondary-liability rules could force providers to monitor and police all user activity, raising costs and privacy concerns. Copyright owners have argued that without stronger accountability for intermediaries, online piracy remains rampant.

For Cox, the ruling caps years of litigation. The company has said it will continue to cooperate with copyright holders through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown process, though the court noted that the statute creates defenses rather than new causes of action.

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Bayer’s Monsanto sues mRNA COVID-19 vaccine makers

Bayer’s agrochemicals unit Monsanto has filed lawsuits in the US against the manufacturers of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines, claiming that they used its patent-protected technology in their products.

One lawsuit – filed in a federal court in Delaware – asserts that Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax vaccines, which generated tens of billions of dollars in revenues during the pandemic, used technology developed by Monsanto in the 1980s designed to eliminate ‘problem’ coding sequences in the building blocks of cells “to improve mRNA stability and the amount or quality of protein produced” in crops.

The technology was awarded a US patent in 2010 (No. 7,741,118) and is not due to expire until June 2027. According to the suit, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna used it to stabilise their mRNA vaccines.

“To develop effective mRNA medicines, defendants needed to stabilise the mRNA molecule and optimise its protein expression,” it claims, adding that they “optimised and manufactured their infringing mRNA vaccine products starting with a DNA template” and using Monsanto’s patented process.

Meanwhile, Reuters has also reported that Bayer independently filed a similar lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson in a New Jersey federal court, contending that a DNA-based process the company used in manufacturing its adenovirus vector-based COVID-19 vaccine also infringes the patent.

The shot – known as the Janssen vaccine – won emergency authorisations in the US and other markets and made blockbuster sales in the pandemic before its use diminished due to concerns about rare clotting side effects. It was withdrawn from sale in the US in 2023.

While sales are well down on their peak, Comirnaty brought in worldwide revenues of more than $3.3 billion for Pfizer and BioNTech last year, with Moderna earning $3.2 billion from Spikevax.

Bayer has said it does not intend to do anything that would restrict the commercial use of the COVID-19 vaccines – although, that is already being achieved due to changing immunisation policies in the US under the Trump administration – but is seeking damages “in an amount adequate to compensate” for the infringement of its intellectual property and royalties on sales.

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AI-Generated Art Can’t Receive Copyright Protection After Supreme Court Declines Case

The advancement of AI-generated art suffered a crucial blow this week when the Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling that such works cannot be protected under U.S. copyright law.

The original plaintiff, a computer scientist from Missouri named Stephen Thaler, appealed to the Supreme Court after “lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office ​decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ​because it did not have a human creator,” per Reuters.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for ⁠a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI ​technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and ​purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright.

According to The Verge, the U.S. Copyright Office issued new guidance last year saying that AI-generated could not enjoy copyright protection, potentially destroying the profitability of text prompts with no original source material. Thaler had also tried to patent his AI-generative works, which has also faced several legal challenges.

“The US federal circuit court similarly determined that AI systems can’t patent inventions because they aren’t human, which the US Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance, stating that while AI systems can’t be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them,” noted The Verge.

Thaler’s lawyers argued admitted that the Supreme Court’s rejection could likely hurt the advancement of AI-generated artworks.

“Even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late,” Thaler’s lawyers claimed. “The Copyright Office ​will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative ​industry during ⁠critically important years.”

Without copyright protection, AI-generated works would fall under public domain, allowing anyone to copy, sell, or use, essentially destroying the potential to create commercial intellectual property.

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Disney Sends Cease-and-Desist Letter to Chinese ByteDance To Stop Use of Copyrighted Characters in New Seedance 2.0 AI Video Generator

ByteDance reportedly is vowing to comply.

The release of the revolutionary Seedance 2.0 AI video generator has sent Hollywood into a frenzy, with the Motion Picture Association and several class organizations firing on all cylinders against the Chinese company ByteDance.

Now, Disney has gone one step further and sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing it of ‘using Disney characters to train and power the AI generator without permission’.

Reuters reported:

“Disney said ByteDance had pre‑packaged Seedance with a pirated library of copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel, portraying them as if they were public-domain clip art, the person said.

The letter alleges Seedance is reproducing, distributing and creating derivative works featuring Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and other characters, the person added.”

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Tokyo Court Ruling Against Cloudflare Sets “Dangerous Precedent” for Internet Infrastructure Liability

Cloudflare has been ordered by a Tokyo District Court to pay 500 million yen, about 3.2 million US dollars, after judges ruled the company liable for aiding copyright infringement.

The decision, as reported by TorrentFreak, brought by a coalition of Japan’s largest manga publishers, challenges the long-held understanding that network infrastructure providers are not responsible for what passes through their systems.

It also signals a growing international push to make companies like Cloudflare police online content, an approach that could redefine how the open internet operates.

The publishers, Shueisha, Kodansha, Kadokawa, and Shogakukan, argued that Cloudflare’s global network, which caches and accelerates websites, helped pirate manga sites distribute illegal copies of their work. They said Cloudflare’s failure to verify customer identities allowed those sites to hide “under circumstances where strong anonymity was secured,” a factor the court said contributed to its finding of liability.

Cloudflare said it will appeal, calling the ruling a threat to fairness and due process and warning that it could have broad implications for the future of internet infrastructure. The company argues that its conduct complies with global norms and that it has no direct control over the content its clients publish or distribute.

The legal fight between Cloudflare and Japan’s major publishers began in 2018. The publishers asked the Tokyo District Court to intervene, claiming Cloudflare’s technology enabled piracy sites to thrive. They wanted the company to sever ties with the offending domains.

In 2019, a partial settlement was reached. The deal, later disclosed, required Cloudflare to stop replicating content from sites only after Japanese courts officially declared them illegal.

That agreement quieted the conflict for a time, but it did not resolve the larger question of whether a network service should be required to decide which content is lawful.

By early 2022, the same publishers returned to court, alleging that Cloudflare had failed to take “necessary measures” against known infringing sites.

They filed a new claim targeting four specific works and sought around four million dollars in damages. They also asked for an order that would compel Cloudflare to terminate service for illegal sites.

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ChatGPT’s Use Of Song Lyrics Violates Copyright, Munich Court Finds

  • Judges found GEMA’s claims valid, ordering OpenAI to cease reproduction and provide damages and disclosure.
  • The court said GPT-4 and GPT-4o “memorized” lyrics, amounting to reproduction under EU copyright rules.
  • The decision, not yet final, could set a major European precedent on AI training data.

Germany’s national music rights organization secured a partial but decisive win against OpenAI after a Munich court ruled that ChatGPT’s underlying models unlawfully reproduced copyrighted German song lyrics.

The ruling orders OpenAI to cease reproduction, disclose relevant training details, and compensate rights holders.

It is not yet final, and OpenAI may appeal.

If upheld, the decision could reshape how AI companies source and license creative material in Europe, as regulators weigh broader obligations for model transparency and training-data provenance.

The case marks the first time a European court has found that a large language model violated copyright by memorizing protected works.

In its decision, the 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court said that GPT-4 and GPT-4o contained “reproducible” lyrics from nine well-known songs, including Kristina Bach’s “Atemlos” and Rolf Zuckowski’s “Wie schön, dass du geboren bist.”

The court held that such memorization constitutes a “fixation” of the original works in the model’s parameters, satisfying the legal definition of reproduction under Article 2 of the EU InfoSoc Directive and Germany’s Copyright Act.

“At least in individual cases, when prompted accordingly, the model produces an output whose content is at least partially identical to content from the earlier training dataset,” a translated copy of the written judgement provided by the Munich court to Decrypt reads.

The model “generates a sequence of tokens that appears statistically plausible because, for example, it was contained in the training process in a particularly stable or frequently recurring form,” the court wrote, adding that because this “token sequence appeared on a large number of publicly accessible websites“ it meant that it was “included in the training dataset more than once.”

In the pleadings, GEMA argued that the model’s output lyrics were almost verbatim when prompted, proving that OpenAI’s systems had retained and reproduced the works.

OpenAI countered that its models do not store training data directly and that any output results from user prompts, not from deliberate copying.

The company also invoked text-and-data-mining exceptions, which allow temporary reproductions for analytical use.

“We disagree with the ruling and are considering next steps,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Decrypt. “The decision is for a limited set of lyrics and does not impact the millions of people, businesses, and developers in Germany that use our technology every day.” 

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