Natasha Lyonne says AI has an ethics problem because right now it’s ‘super kosher copacetic to rob freely under the auspices of acceleration’; Fortune, December 20, 2025

Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez , Fortune; Natasha Lyonne says AI has an ethics problem because right now it’s ‘super kosher copacetic to rob freely under the auspices of acceleration’

"Asteria partnered with Moonvalley AI, which makes AI tools for filmmakers, to create Marey, named after cinematographer Étienne-Jules Marey. The tool helps generate AI video that can be used for movies and TV, but only draws on open-license content or material it has explicit permission to use. 

Being careful about the inputs for Asteria’s AI video generation is important, Lyonne said at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco last week. As AI use increases, both tech and Hollywood need to respect the work of the cast, as well as the crew and the writers behind the scenes. 

“I don’t think it’s super kosher copacetic to just kind of rob freely under the auspices of acceleration or China,” she said. 

While she hasn’t yet used AI to help make a TV show or movie, Lyonne said Asteria has used it in other small ways to develop renderings and other details.

“It’s a pretty revolutionary act that we actually do have that model and that’s you know the basis for everything that we work on,” said Lyonne.

Marey is available to the public for a credits-based subscription starting at $14.99 per month."

The Disney-OpenAI Deal Redefines the AI Copyright War; Wired, December 11, 2025

BRIAN BARRETT, Wired; The Disney-OpenAI Deal Redefines the AI Copyright War

 "“I think that AI companies and copyright holders are beginning to understand and become reconciled to the fact that neither side is going to score an absolute victory,” says Matthew Sag, a professor of law and artificial intelligence at Emory University. While many of these cases are still working their way through the courts, so far it seems like model inputs—the training data that these models learn from—are covered by fair use. But this deal is about outputs—what the model returns based on your prompt—where IP owners like Disney have a much stronger case

Coming to an output agreement resolves a host of messy, potentially unsolvable issues. Even if a company tells an AI model not to produce, say, Elsa at a Wendy’s drive-through, the model might know enough about Elsa to do so anyway—or a user might be able to prompt their way into making Elsa without asking for the character by name. It’s a tension that legal scholars call the “Snoopy problem,” but in this case you might as well call it the Disney problem.

“Faced with this increasingly clear reality, it makes sense for consumer-facing AI companies and entertainment giants like Disney to think about licensing arrangements,” says Sag."

Disney says Google AI infringes copyright “on a massive scale”; Ars Technica, December 11, 2025

 RYAN WHITWAM , Ars Technica; Disney says Google AI infringes copyright “on a massive scale”

"Disney has sent a cease and desist to Google, alleging the company’s AI tools are infringing Disney’s copyrights “on a massive scale.”

According to the letter, Google is violating the entertainment conglomerate’s intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice says Google has copied a “large corpus” of Disney’s works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google’s image and video models will happily produce popular Disney characters—they couldn’t do that without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

The C&D also takes issue with Google for distributing “copies of its protected works” to consumers."

Has Cambridge-based AI music upstart Suno 'gone legit'?; WBUR, December 11, 2025

 

Tiziana Dearing 

Rob Lane

, WBUR; Has Cambridge-based AI music upstart Suno 'gone legit'?

"The Cambridge-based AI music company Suno, which has been besieged by lawsuits from record labels, is now teaming up with behemoth label Warner Music. Under a new partnership, Warner will license music in its catalogue for use by Suno's AI.

Copyright law experts Peter Karol and Bhamati Viswanathan join WBUR's Morning Edition to discuss what the deal between Suno and Warner Music means for the future of intellectual property."

Bannon, top conservatives urge White House to reject Big Tech’s ‘fair use’ push to justify AI copyright theft: ‘Un-American and absurd’; New York Post, December 1, 2025

Thomas Barrabi , New York Post; Bannon, top conservatives urge White House to reject Big Tech’s ‘fair use’ push to justify AI copyright theft: ‘Un-American and absurd’

"Prominent conservatives including Steve Bannon are urging the Trump administration to reject an increasingly popular argument that tech giants are using to rip off copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence.

So-called “fair use” doctrine – which argues that the use of copyrighted content without permission is legally justified if it is done in the public interest – has become a common defense for AI firms like Google, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Microsoft who have been accused of ripping off work.

The argument’s biggest backers also include White House AI czar David Sacks, who has warned that Silicon Valley firms “would be crippled” in a crucial race against AI firms in China unless they can rely on fair use protection...

Bannon and his allies threw cold water on such claims in a Monday letter addressed to US Attorney General Pam Bondi and Michael Kratsios, who heads the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“This is un-American and absurd,” the conservatives argued in the letter, which was exclusively obtained by The Post. “We must compete and win the global AI race the American way — by ensuring we protect creators, children, conservatives, and communities.”...

The conservatives point to clear economic incentives to back copyright-protected industries, which contribute more than $2 trillion to the US GDP, carry an average annual wage of more than $140,000 and account for a $37 billion trade surplus, according to the letter...

The letter notes that money is no object for the companies leading the AI boom, which “enjoy virtually unlimited access to financing” and are each valued at hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars.

“In a free market, businesses pay for the inputs they need,” the letter said. “Imagine if AI CEOs claimed they needed free access to semiconductors, energy, researchers, and developers to build their products. They would be laughed out of their boardrooms.”...

The letter is the latest salvo in a heated policy divide as AI models gobble up data from the web. Critics accuse companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Meta of essentially seeking a “license to steal” from news outlets, artists, authors and others that produce original work."

You Can’t Use Copyrighted Characters in OpenAI’s Sora Anymore and People Are Freaking Out; Gizmodo, October 8, 2025

 AJ DELLINGER, Gizmodo; You Can’t Use Copyrighted Characters in OpenAI’s Sora Anymore and People Are Freaking Out

 "OpenAI may be able to appease copyright holders by shifting its Sora policies, but it’s now pissed off its users. As 404 Media pointed out, social channels like Twitter and Reddit are now flooded with Sora users who are angry they can’t make 10-second clips featuring their favorite characters anymore. One user in the OpenAI subreddit said that being able to play with copyrighted material was “the only reason this app was so fun.” Another claimed, “Moral policing and leftist ideology are destroying America’s AI industry.” So, you know, it seems like they’re handling this well."

Who owns the copyright for AI work?; Financial Times, August 24, 2025

  BARRY SCANNELL, Financial Times; Who owns the copyright for AI work?

"Generative artificial intelligence poses two copyright puzzles. The first is the widely discussed question of compensation for work used to train AI models. The second, which has yet to receive as much attention, concerns the work that AI produces. Copyright is granted to authors. So what happens to work that has no human author?"

Why the new rulings on AI copyright might actually be good news for publishers; Fast Company, July 9, 2025

 PETE PACHAL, Fast Company; Why the new rulings on AI copyright might actually be good news for publishers

"The outcomes of both cases were more mixed than the headlines suggest, and they are also deeply instructive. Far from closing the door on copyright holders, they point to places where litigants might find a key...

Taken together, the three cases point to a clearer path forward for publishers building copyright cases against Big AI:

Focus on outputs instead of inputs: It’s not enough that someone hoovered up your work. To build a solid case, you need to show that what the AI company did with it reproduced it in some form. So far, no court has definitively decided whether AI outputs are meaningfully different enough to count as “transformative” in the eyes of copyright law, but it should be noted that courts have ruled in the past that copyright violation can occur even when small parts of the work are copied—ifthose parts represent the “heart” of the original.

Show market harm: This looks increasingly like the main battle. Now that we have a lot of data on how AI search engines and chatbots—which, to be clear, are outputs—are affecting the online behavior of news consumers, the case that an AI service harms the media market is easier to make than it was a year ago. In addition, the emergence of licensing deals between publishers and AI companies is evidence that there’s market harm by creating outputs without offering such a deal.

Question source legitimacy: Was the content legally acquired or pirated? The Anthropic case opens this up as a possible attack vector for publishers. If they can prove scraping occurred through paywalls—without subscribing first—that could be a violation even absent any outputs."

Fair Use or Foul Play? The AI Fair Use Copyright Line; The National Law Review, July 2, 2025

Jodi Benassi of McDermott Will & Emery  , The National Law Review; Fair Use or Foul Play? The AI Fair Use Copyright Line

"Practice note: This is the first federal court decision analyzing the defense of fair use of copyrighted material to train generative AI. Two days after this decision issued, another Northern District of California judge ruled in Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. et al., Case No. 3:23-cv-03417, and concluded that the AI technology at issue in his case was transformative. However, the basis for his ruling in favor of Meta on the question of fair use was not transformation, but the plaintiffs’ failure “to present meaningful evidence that Meta’s use of their works to create [a generative AI engine] impacted the market” for the books."

The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives; Financial Times, June 23, 2025

MARTIN WOLF, Financial Times ; The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives

"One is that the government itself estimates that “creative industries generated £126bn in gross value added to the economy [5 per cent of GDP] and employed 2.4 million people in 2022”. It is at the very least an open question whether the value added of the AI industry will ever be of a comparable scale in this country. Another is that the creative industries represent much of the best of what the UK and indeed humanity does. The idea of handing over its output for free is abhorrent...

Interestingly, for much of the 19th century, the US did not recognise international copyright at all in its domestic law. Anthony Trollope himself complained fiercely about the theft of the copyright over his books."

I’m Not Convinced Ethical Generative AI Currently Exists; Wired, February 20, 2025

REECE ROGERS , Wired; I’m Not Convinced Ethical Generative AI Currently Exists

"For me, the ethics of generative AI use can be broken down to issues with how the models are developed—specifically, how the data used to train them was accessed—as well as ongoing concerns about their environmental impact. In order to power a chatbot or image generator, an obscene amount of data is required, and the decisions developers have made in the past—and continue to make—to obtain this repository of data are questionable and shrouded in secrecy. Even what people in Silicon Valley call “open source” models hide the training datasets inside...

The ethical aspects of AI outputs will always circle back to our human inputs. What are the intentions of the user’s prompts when interacting with a chatbot? What were the biases in the training data? How did the devs teach the bot to respond to controversial queries? Rather than focusing on making the AI itself wiser, the real task at hand is cultivating more ethical development practices and user interactions."

OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims; Bloomberg Law, August 29, 2024

 Annelise Gilbert, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Pushes Prompt-Hacking Defense to Deflect Copyright Claims

"Diverting attention to hacking claims or how many tries it took to obtain exemplary outputs, however, avoids addressing most publishers’ primary allegation: AI tools illegally trained on copyrighted works."

Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts; Reuters, August 4, 2024

 Blake Brittain, Reuters; Music labels' AI lawsuits create copyright puzzle for courts

"Suno and Udio pointed to past public statements defending their technology when asked for comment for this story. They filed their initial responses in court on Thursday, denying any copyright violations and arguing that the lawsuits were attempts to stifle smaller competitors. They compared the labels' protests to past industry concerns about synthesizers, drum machines and other innovations replacing human musicians...

The labels' claims echo allegations by novelists, news outlets, music publishers and others in high-profile copyright lawsuits over chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude that use generative AI to create text. Those lawsuits are still pending and in their early stages.

Both sets of cases pose novel questions for the courts, including whether the law should make exceptions for AI's use of copyrighted material to create something new...

"Music copyright has always been a messy universe," said Julie Albert, an intellectual property partner at law firm Baker Botts in New York who is tracking the new cases. And even without that complication, Albert said fast-evolving AI technology is creating new uncertainty at every level of copyright law.

WHOSE FAIR USE?

The intricacies of music may matter less in the end if, as many expect, the AI cases boil down to a "fair use" defense against infringement claims - another area of U.S. copyright law filled with open questions."

You Can Create Award-Winning Art With AI. Can You Copyright It?; Bloomberg Law, June 5, 2024

 Matthew S. Schwartz, Bloomberg Law; You Can Create Award-Winning Art With AI. Can You Copyright It?

"We delved into the controversy surrounding the use of copyrighted material in training AI systems in our first two episodes of this season. Now we shift our focus to the output. Who owns artwork created using artificial intelligence? Should our legal system redefine what constitutes authorship? Or, as AI promises to redefine how we create, will the government cling to historical notions of authorship?

Guests:

• Jason M. Allen, founder of Art Incarnate
• Sy Damle, partner in the copyright litigation group at Latham & Watkins
• Shira Perlmutter, Register of Copyrights and director of the US Copyright Office"

Will the rise of AI spell the end of intellectual property rights?; The Globe and Mail, May 27, 2024

 SHEEMA KHAN , The Globe and Mail; Will the rise of AI spell the end of intellectual property rights?

"AI’s first challenge to IP is in the inputs...

Perhaps the question will become: Will IP be the death of AI?...

The second challenge relates to who owns the AI-generated products...

Yet IP rights are key to innovation, as they provide a limited monopoly to monetize investments in research and development. AI represents an existential threat in this regard.

Clearly, the law has not caught up. But sitting idly by is not an option, as there are too many important policy issues at play."