Copyright Law in 2025: Courts begin to draw lines around AI training, piracy, and market harm; Reuters, March 16, 2026

 Edward D. Lanquist and Benjamin West Janke , Reuters; Copyright Law in 2025: Courts begin to draw lines around AI training, piracy, and market harm

"In 2025, U.S. courts issued the first substantive, merits-stage decisions addressing whether the use of copyrighted works to train generative artificial intelligence systems constitutes "fair use." Although these rulings do not settle all open questions — and in some respects highlight emerging judicial disagreements — they represent a significant inflection point in copyright law's response to large language models, image generators, and other foundation models.

Taken together, these cases establish early guideposts for AI developers, publishers, media companies, and enterprises deploying generative AI systems. Below, we summarize the most important copyright ​decisions and pending cases shaping the law in 2025...

Conclusion and recommendations

The ​2025 decisions reflect cautious but meaningful progress in defining how copyright law applies to generative AI. Courts are increasingly receptive to fair use arguments for training on lawfully acquired data, deeply skeptical of speculative market-harm claims, and uniformly intolerant of piracy. At the same time, cases involving direct competition, news content, and human likeness may test the limits of these early rulings."

Can Gen AI and Copyright Coexist?; Harvard Business Review, July 16, 2025

 Michael D. Smith and Rahul Telang, Harvard Business Review ; Can Gen AI and Copyright Coexist?

"We’re experts in the study of digital transformation and have given this issue a lot of thought. We recently served, for example, on a roundtable of 10 economists convened by the U.S. Copyright Office to study the implications of gen AI on copyright policy. We recognize that the two decisions are far from the last word on this topic; both will no doubt be appealed to the Ninth Circuit and then subsequently to the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, we believe there are already many lessons to be learned from these decisions about the implications of gen AI for business—lessons that will be useful for leaders in both the creative industries and gen AI companies."