The Supreme Court just buried the easy AI copyright case. What’s left is the gray zone: what counts as authorship, how you prove it, what you can own, and what can still get you sued.
The internet loves a clean answer, especially when there isn’t one.
So when the Supreme Court denied cert in Thaler…
A celebrity fitness guru sued a former trainer for copying her exercise routines. The Ninth Circuit said they aren’t choreography.
In a 2023 interview with The Wall Street Journal, celebrity fitness guru Tracy Anderson was asked which fitness trend she’d like to see disappear forever. Her answer was characteristically blunt: “Every single person that…
The entertainment industry’s legal claims in AI copyright cases are strong, but the launch of Bytedance’s Seedance 2.0 highlights the harder challenge: enforcing them across borders.
A frenetic five-day stretch last week that started with Tuesday’s launch of Seedance 2.0—a next-generation AI video model so realistic that even Hollywood insiders struggled to dismiss it…
The Mondrian Trust claims a 1930 painting is still protected—citing “dual copyrights,” Spanish law, and a misreading of the Copyright Act.
Last February, I wrote about a troubling trend: estates and rightsholders making aggressive (and legally questionable) claims to works that have entered the public domain. From Tintin to Charlie Chaplin to Sherlock Holmes,…
A sweeping new ruling holds that U.S. copyright termination and renewal reach worldwide, upending long-settled limits of copyright territoriality.
Attention, foreign nations: the United States is no longer content to come for your oil, your rare earth minerals, or your TikTok. We’re coming for your copyrights too.
That’s the upshot of the Fifth Circuit’s new decision in Vetter v.…
Issued days apart on opposite coasts, Gray v. Paramount Global and Yonay v. Paramount Pictures Corp. reveal copyright’s outer limits—what’s protected, what isn’t, and the consequences of crossing the line.
Talk about a victory roll. Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick just picked up not one but two copyright wins in the span of a single week.…
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the jury verdict in Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg—but two judges used the occasion to call for scrapping the court’s intrinsic test for substantial similarity. En banc review may be next.
The Ninth Circuit rang in the new year with two opinions in Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg, the long-running photography-meets-tattoo copyright case…
From novel legal theories to repeated mistakes, 2025 delivered no shortage of questionable copyright rulings. These five cases led the way.
Welcome to Copyright Lately’s sixth annual countdown of the year’s biggest judicial misfires. When I started this tradition back in 2020, I thought courts might eventually stop handing out new material. Fortunately, they remain…
From Nancy Drew to Animal Crackers to The Maltese Falcon, 1930’s greatest works enter the U.S. public domain on January 1, 2026. Expect celebration, confusion, and at least one Betty Boop slasher film. Sorry in advance.
The weather’s getting colder, the nights are getting longer, and Hollywood has decided Betty Boop would be more marketable…
News publishers just cleared a key hurdle against Cohere in a copyright fight over AI-generated “substitutive summaries” of their reporting.
If you’re only keeping a loose eye on the fifty-plus AI copyright lawsuits now crawling their way through federal courts, you may have missed an important new ruling last week out of the Southern District…
