When AI and IP Collide: What Journalists Need to Know; National Press Foundation (NPF), January 22, 2026

 National Press Foundation (NPF); When AI and IP Collide: What Journalists Need to Know

"With roughly 70 federal lawsuits waged against AI developers, the intersection of technology and intellectual property is now one of the most influential legal beats. Courts are jumping in to define the future of “fair use.” To bridge the gap between complex legal proceedings and the public’s understanding, NPF held a webinar to unpack these intellectual property battles. One thing all of the expert panelists agreed on: most cases are either an issue of input – i.e. what the AI models pull in to train on – or output – what AI generates, as in the case of Disney and other Hollywood studios v. Midjourney.

“The behavior here of AI companies and the assertion of fair use is completely understandable in our market capitalist system – all players want something very simple. They want their inputs for little or nothing and their outputs to be very expensive,” said Loyola Law professor Justin Hughes. “The fair use argument is all about AI companies wanting their inputs to be free, just like ranchers want their grazing land from the federal government to be free or their mining rights to be free.” AI Copyright Cases Journalists Should Know: Bartz et al. v. Anthropic: Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement in a landmark case for the industry after a class of book authors accused the company of using pirated books to train the Claude AI model. “The mere training itself may be fair use, but the retention of these large copy data sets and their replication or your training from having taken pirated data sets, that’s not fair use,” Hughes explained. The NYT Company v. Microsoft Corporation et al.: This is a massive multi-district litigation in New York where the NYT is suing OpenAI. The Times has pushed for discovery into over 20 million private ChatGPT logs to prove that this model is being used to get past paywalls. Advance Local Media LLC et al. v. Cohere Inc.: The case against the startup Cohere is particularly vital for newsrooms as a judge ruled that AI-generated summaries infringe of news organizations’ ability to get traffic on their sites. “We’ve seen, there’s been a lot of developers who have taken the kind of classic Silicon Valley approach of ask forgiveness rather than permission,” said Terry Hart, general counsel of the Association of American Publishers. “They have gone ahead and trained a lot of models using a lot of copyrighted works without authorization.” Tech companies have trained massive models to ingest the entirety of the internet, including articles, without prior authorization, and Hughes points out that this is a repeated occurrence. AI companies often keep unauthorized copies of these vast datasets to retrain and tweak their models, leading to multiple steps of reproduction that could violate copyright. AI and U.S. Innovation A common defense from tech companies in Silicon Valley is that using these vast amounts of data is necessary to U.S. innovation and keeping the economy competitive. “‘We need to beat China, take our word for it, this is going to be great, and we’re just going to cut out a complete sector of the economy that’s critical to the success of our models,'” Hart said. “In the long run, that’s not good for innovation. It’s not good for the creative sectors and it’s not good for the AI sector.” Reuters technology reporter Deepa Seetharaman has also heard the China competition argument, among others. “The metaphor that I’ll hear a lot here is, ‘it’s like somebody visiting a library and reading every book, except this is a system that can remember every book and remember all the pieces of every book. And so why are you … harming us for developing something that’s so capable?'” Seetharaman said. Hughes noted that humans are not walking into a library with a miniature high-speed photocopier to memorize every book. Humans don’t memorize with the “faithful” precision of a machine. Hart added that the metaphor breaks down because technology has created a new market space that isn’t comparable to a human reader. Speakers:

• Wayne Brough, Resident Senior Fellow, Technology and Innovation Team, R Street
• Terry Hart, General Counsel, Association of American Publishers
• Justin Hughes, Honorable William Matthew Byrne Distinguished Professor of Law, Loyola Marymount University
• Deepa Seetharaman, Tech Correspondent, Reuters

Summary and transcript: https://nationalpress.org/topic/when-... This event is sponsored by The Copyright Alliance and NSG Next Solutions Group. This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios. NPF is solely responsible for the content."