BC Professor Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use Of Copyrighted Textbooks; The Heights, October 25, 2026

 Nikita Osadchiy , The Heights; BC Professor Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over Use Of Copyrighted Textbooks

"A Boston College finance professor is among six textbook authors suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging the companies downloaded their books from pirate websites and used them without authorization to train their large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT.

“OpenAI reproduced Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s Works without authorization by downloading them from shadow libraries, copying them into datasets and computer memory, converting them into training-ready formats, and copying them into the materials used to train their LLMs and ChatGPT,” the textbook authors argued in their complaint. 

The suit seeks to represent every textbook author whose copyrighted work OpenAI or Microsoft allegedly copied. 

Alan Marcus, the Mario J. Gabelli endowed professor of finance at the Carroll School of Management, filed the proposed class-action lawsuit on Aug. 14 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York alongside five current and former professors from across the country. 

The plaintiffs name Microsoft in the lawsuit for its role in building the infrastructure on which OpenAI trained its models and profiting by building those models into products like Bing Chat and Copilot, the complaint alleges."

Owners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement; The New York Times, October 25, 2026

 Derrick Bryson Taylor, The New York Times; Owners of Elvis Presley’s Music Sue Anthropic for Copyright Infringement

The $41 million lawsuit contends that the A.I. company used Presley’s music to train its models without permission. Anthropic disagrees with the claims.

"The owners of Elvis Presley’s music sued the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, saying it trained its models on more than 200 of Presley’s songs without their permission, and accusing it of copyright infringement.

The suit, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on behalf of several parties, seeks a jury trial and more than $41 million, or $150,000 per song, in damages.

The owners of the music, who include the licensing company Authentic Brands Group, Raleigh Music Publishing, multiple trusts and at least one individual, also accused Anthropic, the company behind the popular chatbot Claude, of circumventing measures used to protect the music and removing or altering copyright management information from the songs."

Hundreds Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement, Rejecting Class Action Payouts; Publishers Weekly, October 21, 2026

 Ed Nawotka , Publishers Weekly; Hundreds Sue Meta for Copyright Infringement, Rejecting Class Action Payouts

"Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms on October 19 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books and, more recently, on physical books it bought and scanned without a license.

Rather than join a class action suit, in which a few named plaintiffs sue on behalf of everyone, each author is pursuing an individual claim...

Plaintiffs range in prominence: Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries; Reyna Grande, a memoirist; Mark Spragg, a novelist; Rachel Nuwer, a journalist; Silvia Foti, author of The Nazi’s Granddaughter; and Minxin Pei, a scholar on China.

All of the authors signed up through ClaimsHero, a platform that partnered with Freedman Normand Friedland and Stris & Maher last fall to recruit authors to opt out of the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement and sue on their own. The new suits arrive as the first cases from that effort approach trial.

Suits brought by Chicken Soup for the Soul, by academic publisher Cognella and by Cambronne, the company of journalist John Carreyrou, are among the related cases against Meta scheduled for jury trials beginning May 3, 2027."

USA Today Sues OpenAI For Over $250 Million, Alleging Willful Copyright Infringement; Forbes, October 8, 2026

 Fiona Riley, Forbes; USA Today Sues OpenAI For Over $250 Million, Alleging Willful Copyright Infringement

"USA Today Co., Inc. and 13 affiliated entities are seeking more than $250 million in damages from OpenAI, including up to $150,000 for each willfully infringed work and up to $25,000 for every time OpenAI stripped copyright information, according to the complaint, which was filed in New York federal court on Thursday."

 HASSAN ALI KANU, Politico; News publishers accuse Trump admin of bias toward AI companies in copyright suit

The Justice Department earlier this month filed a statement in court supporting OpenAI’s defense in the publishers' copyright lawsuit.

"Lawyers for The New York Times and other major publishers on Monday asked a federal court to disregard the Justice Department’s efforts to get involved in their lawsuit against OpenAI, saying the Trump administration may simply be biased in the company’s favor.

The publishers are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The Justice Department earlier this month filed a statement supporting OpenAI’s defense in the case, arguing that copying others’ content without permission in order to train large language models is protected under the “fair use” doctrine.

The newspapers on Monday responded that DOJ had discounted the Copyright Office’s contrary conclusion on fair use and AI, and noting that the government is seeking to weigh in at an especially early stage of the case.

“That the DOJ fails to acknowledge any possible contrary views, and dismisses the Copyright Office’s comprehensive study in a footnote, suggests that the DOJ may have been influenced by extraneous considerations — up to and including the Administration’s political and financial interests,” lawyers for the publishers wrote. “Although one could argue that political factors will always influence Government litigation positions to some extent, the nature, extent, and transparency of the AI industry’s efforts to influence this Administration should not be lightly dismissed.”...

The plaintiffs include The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers, as well as a group of authors that includes Sylvia Day, John Grisham and George R. R. Martin."

Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security; ZDNET, September 15, 2026

 David Gewirtz, ZDNET; Why the DOJ’s OpenAI copyright stance is the real threat to national security

The DOJ argues that AI training is transformative fair use, but publishers say unlicensed scraping threatens their survival. This copyright fight could shape the future of online knowledge.

"Ever since generative AI arrived in early 2023, we’ve seen that its almost unlimited base of knowledge is due to how the big AI companies trained their models. To a large degree, AI models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic have been trained on anything they could ingest, including nearly all the copyrighted material on the web.

The AI companies are even reported to be buying up physical books by the millions, cutting them apart, scanning them in, and then disposing of the remains. For example, based on a search of the Anthropic settlement database, I know the company scanned my book, The Flexible Enterprise, and included it in the Claude corpus. I was never asked for permission. I don’t even get a free Claude account.

Due to the bulk ingestion of intellectual property, many companies filed suit against the AI companies. One such company is Ziff Davis, the owner of ZDNET. Disclosure: Ziff is also the company that pays me each week for my writing here.

Two weeks ago, on Sept. 1, 2026, the US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the case is being litigated. What makes this statement particularly interesting is that the DOJ is not one of the parties in the case. The government is putting its thumb on the scale, weighing in on a lawsuit between private parties.

On Monday, Fortune published a commentary by Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, regarding the Justice Department’s unusual intervention in the case. In this article, I’ll briefly summarize the DOJ’s statement, then discuss Shah’s premise, and then pick up and expand upon it with some of my own thoughts."