Baron App, Inc. d/b/a Cameo v. OpenAI, Inc., et al. is a case in the Northern District of California that pits a company supplying bespoke celebrity greetings against an AI company that provides AI-generated celebrity videos. The plaintiff has a registered trademark for CAMEO and uses it in connection with having live actors record videos…
Nwosuocha v. Glover et al. was a copyright infringement case that started in the Southern District of New York and found its final disposition in the Second Circuit. The case centered around an “incurable” defect in Nwosuocha’s claim that he was warned about and subsequently ignored. Emelike Nwosuocha (a/k/a Kid Wes) brought the claim of…
Athos Overseas Limited Corp. v. YouTube, Inc. et al. was a case from the Eleventh Circuit originating from the Southern District of Florida in which Athos Overseas (“Athos”) alleged copyright infringement against YouTube based on the unauthorized posting of its copyrighted material. Following discovery, Athos filed a motion for partial summary judgment and YouTube filed…
In Neil Zlozower v. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc., the storied Hall of Fame brought a motion for judgment on the pleadings in the Northern District of Ohio (that is, their home turf) after the plaintiff brought a claim for copyright infringement. The Hall of Fame countered with a motion…
In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California’s case Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (which we wrote about here), the parties reached a historic settlement. It aims to distribute $1.5 billion among authors and publishers whose pirated works were used to train Anthropic’s large language model called Claude. The datasets made from the…
In Re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation is another proposed class action by authors involving alleged infringement by large language models (LLMs). Here, the class would represent authors and copyright holders of fiction and non-fiction books who assert claims on their own and on behalf of the proposed class. Plaintiffs alleged OpenAI infringed their copyrights…
Richardson v. Kharbouch was a case we wrote about in February of 2024 that hinged on the difference between copyright in a composition and copyright in a sound recording. The case involved an ambitious, teen hip-hop artist known as Hotwire the Producer (Eddie Richardson), who crafted a unique beat that he later identified in the…
In Re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation addresses a class action of authors and visual artists against Google for direct copyright infringement, and its parent company, Alphabet, for vicarious infringement. This particular case stands out because the plaintiffs claim that copyright infringement occurred when the rightsholders’ works were copied into generative AI models, not that…
A muralist’s claim of copyright infringement had several false starts, a change of venue, and a stinging defeat on appeal – all of which could have been prevented.
A subpoena enforcement action in the Ninth Circuit concerned the movie studio Capstone Pictures’ DMCA claim against internet service provider Cox Communications. Capstone alleged that Cox violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) by not suspending the accounts of users who were downloading and sharing its movie Fall. At issue was section 512 (“512”) of…