FREE WEBINAR: REGISTER: AI, Intellectual Property and the Emerging Legal Landscape; National Press Foundation, Thursday, January 22, 2026

 National Press Foundation; REGISTER: AI, Intellectual Property and the Emerging Legal Landscape

"Artificial intelligence is colliding with U.S. copyright law in ways that could reshape journalism, publishing, software, and the creative economy.

The intersection of AI and intellectual property has become one of the most consequential legal battles of the digital age, with roughly 70 federal lawsuits filed against AI companies and copyright claims on works ranging from literary and visual work to music and sound recording to computer programs. Billions of dollars are at stake.

Courts are now deciding what constitutes “fair use,” whether and how AI companies may use copyrighted material to build models, what licensing is required, and who bears responsibility when AI outputs resemble protected works. The legal decisions will shape how news, art, and knowledge are produced — and who gets paid for them.

To help journalists better understand and report on the developing legal issues of AI and IP, join the National Press Foundation and a panel of experts for a wide-ranging discussion around the stakes, impact and potential solutions. Experts in technology and innovation as well as law and economics join journalists in this free online briefing 12-1 p.m. ET on Thursday, January 22, 2026."

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage; The Guardian, January 18, 2026

 Cory Doctorow, The Guardian; AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage

"The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use “disrupt” here in its most disreputable tech-bro sense.

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AI that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself and give the other half to the AI company.

That is the $13tn growth story that Morgan Stanley is telling. It’s why big investors are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We would have to figure out what to do with all these unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that does not mean it is going to save anyone money...

After more than 20 years of being consistently wrong and terrible for artists’ rights, the US Copyright Office has finally done something gloriously, wonderfully right. All through this AI bubble, the Copyright Office has maintained – correctly – that AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, because copyright is exclusively for humans. That is why the “monkey selfie” is in the public domain. Copyright is only awarded to works of human creative expression that are fixed in a tangible medium.

And not only has the Copyright Office taken this position, they have defended it vigorously in court, repeatedly winning judgments to uphold this principle.

The fact that every AI-created work is in the public domain means that if Getty or Disney or Universal or Hearst newspapers use AI to generate works – then anyone else can take those works, copy them, sell them or give them away for nothing. And the only thing those companies hate more than paying creative workers, is having other people take their stuff without permission...

AI is a bubble and bubbles are terrible.

Bubbles transfer the life savings of normal people who are just trying to have a dignified retirement to the wealthiest and most unethical people in our society, and every bubble eventually bursts, taking their savings with it."

ESDEEKID CALLS OUT THE CHAINSMOKERS OVER ‘4 RAWS’ REMIX; Billboard, January 3, 2026

 Jessica Lynch, Billboard; ESDEEKID CALLS OUT THE CHAINSMOKERS OVER ‘4 RAWS’ REMIX

"UK rapper EsDeeKid has publicly called out The Chainsmokers after the duo shared a remix of his track “4 Raws” that he says was released without his approval.

In a post on X on Jan. 2, EsDeeKid wrote that the remix was “getting NUKED,” writing, “that chainsmokers remix is getting NUKED mate wow please. don’t remix my sh– and think it’s cool to post to all DSPs.”"

Copyright laws need to modernize to include fan-made edits; The Miami Hurricane, January 14, 2026

 Marissa Levinson, The Miami Hurricane; Copyright laws need to modernize to include fan-made edits

[Kip Currier: Unfortunately, this University of Miami's student newspaper's Op-Ed -- Copyright laws need to modernize to include fan-made edits -- contains staggeringly inaccurate interpretations and assertions about copyright law and fair use. 

No one wanting to make informed decisions on copyright-related matters should rely on the writer's cherry-picked aspects of copyright law that are then stitched together to make wildly erroneous conclusions.

Copyright literacy is essential.]

 

[Excerpt]

"I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve been scrolling through my saved folders on TikTok, Instagram or X to watch video edits of clips from my favorite TV shows, only to find nothing but a shell of what once used to be there, with a body of text over it. It reads: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim.” 

Video edits of shows and movies, which are often paired with trending songs as the audios, have gained traction on social media platforms among hundreds of fan bases. Navigating this new age of fan-generated edits comes with confusion. As copyright laws based on precedent aren’t current enough to guide regulations on this new type of content, video edits deserve to be protected under copyright law.

Are edits legal?

Fan-made video edits range from less than 30-seconds to a few minutes long. This poses the question of whether they are legal in terms of copyright. The law gives copyright the “power ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Investors the exclusive Right to their Respective Writings and Discoveries,’” according to Article 1, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. 

This means, under the Copyright Act of 1976, “original works of authorship fixed in tangible medium of expression” are protected. According to the four exemptions of the copyright law, video edits are protected by the first amendment and therefore, should be legal to publish."

Adviser in Anne Frank case suggests VPNs alone don’t break copyright borders; Courthouse News Service, January 15, 2026

 EUNSEO HONG , Courthouse News Service; Adviser in Anne Frank case suggests VPNs alone don’t break copyright borders

"The dispute centers on a clash between the Anne Frank Fonds, which holds the copyright for certain versions of her diary in the Netherlands, and a group of academic and cultural institutions that published a comprehensive scholarly edition of the manuscripts online. While the diary entered the public domain in several EU countries in 2016, including Germany, Belgium and Italy, copyright protection in the Netherlands runs until 2037.

To account for that divide, the publishers limited access where the diary is still protected, using geoblocking and on-screen warnings. The Fonds challenged that setup, arguing that the possibility of access through VPN services was enough to make the publication unlawful in the Netherlands.

Rantos rejected that logic, warning that tying liability to the mere possibility of circumvention would make territorial copyright unworkable online.

“It is common ground that, in both the virtual and real world, no security measure is absolutely inviolable,” he wrote, underscoring that EU law does not expect publishers to do the impossible.

In his view, copyright responsibility turns on a publisher’s conduct, not on every workaround devised by determined users, unless the safeguards are intentionally flimsy or built to be easily defeated.

Stef van Gompel, a professor of intellectual property law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, said the advocate general got it right in drawing a clear line between a publisher’s actions and what users might do to get around them. Treating VPN workarounds alone as a copyright violation, he said, would stretch the law too far.

“Otherwise, this would mark the end of online territorial licensing of copyright in the EU and jeopardize the free flow of information online,” van Gompel said. He warned that otherwise, works published where they are in the public domain could end up effectively off-limits online “if the work is still in copyright in any other country in the world.”"

AI’S MEMORIZATION CRISIS: Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry.; The Atlantic, January 9, 2026

Alex Reisner, The Atlantic; AI’S MEMORIZATION CRISIS: Large language models don’t “learn”—they copy. And that could change everything for the tech industry

"On tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained on, and can reproduce long excerpts from those books."

Extracting books from production language models; Cornell University, January 6, 2026

 Ahmed Ahmed, A. Feder Cooper, Sanmi Koyejo, Percy Liang, Cornell University; Extracting books from production language models

"Many unresolved legal questions over LLMs and copyright center on memorization: whether specific training data have been encoded in the model's weights during training, and whether those memorized data can be extracted in the model's outputs. While many believe that LLMs do not memorize much of their training data, recent work shows that substantial amounts of copyrighted text can be extracted from open-weight models. However, it remains an open question if similar extraction is feasible for production LLMs, given the safety measures these systems implement. We investigate this question using a two-phase procedure: (1) an initial probe to test for extraction feasibility, which sometimes uses a Best-of-N (BoN) jailbreak, followed by (2) iterative continuation prompts to attempt to extract the book. We evaluate our procedure on four production LLMs -- Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Grok 3 -- and we measure extraction success with a score computed from a block-based approximation of longest common substring (nv-recall). With different per-LLM experimental configurations, we were able to extract varying amounts of text. For the Phase 1 probe, it was unnecessary to jailbreak Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 to extract text (e.g, nv-recall of 76.8% and 70.3%, respectively, for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone), while it was necessary for Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1. In some cases, jailbroken Claude 3.7 Sonnet outputs entire books near-verbatim (e.g., nv-recall=95.8%). GPT-4.1 requires significantly more BoN attempts (e.g., 20X), and eventually refuses to continue (e.g., nv-recall=4.0%). Taken together, our work highlights that, even with model- and system-level safeguards, extraction of (in-copyright) training data remains a risk for production LLMs."

‘A nasty little song, really rather evil’: how Every Breath You Take tore Sting and the Police apart; The Guardian, January 15, 2026

 Ben Beaumont-Thomas, The Guardian; ‘A nasty little song, really rather evil’: how Every Breath You Take tore Sting and the Police apart

"This week’s high court hearings between Sting and his former bandmates in the Police, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers, are the latest chapter in the life of a song whose negative energy seems to have seeped out into real life.

Every Breath You Take is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Copeland and Summers against Sting, alleging that he owes them royalties linked to their contributions to the hugely popular song, particularly from streaming earnings, estimated at $2m (£1.5m) in total. Sting’s legal team have countered that previous agreements between him and his bandmates regarding their royalties from the song do not include streaming revenue – and argued in pre-trial documents that the pair may have been “substantially overpaid”. In the hearing’s opening day, it was revealed that since the lawsuit was filed, Sting has paid them $870,000 (£647,000) to redress what his lawyer called “certain admitted historic underpayments”. But there are still plenty of future potential earnings up for debate."

‘WATERSHED RULING’: APPEALS COURT SAYS MUSICIANS CAN WIN BACK THEIR COPYRIGHTS GLOBALLY, NOT JUST IN THE U.S.; Billboard, January 13, 2026

 Bill Donahue, Billboard ; ‘WATERSHED RULING’: APPEALS COURT SAYS MUSICIANS CAN WIN BACK THEIR COPYRIGHTS GLOBALLY, NOT JUST IN THE U.S.

"A federal appeals court issued a first-of-its-kind ruling that says musicians can enforce U.S. copyright termination rules across the globe, adopting a novel legal theory that record labels and publishers have warned will disrupt “a half-century of settled industry norms.”

Upholding a lower court decision last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Monday (Jan. 12) that songwriter Cyril Vetter could win back full global copyright ownership of the 1963 rock classic “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)” from publisher Resnik Music Group.=

What makes the ruling notable is the overseas reach. Termination, a crucial copyright provision that allows authors to recapture their rights decades after they sold them away, has only ever applied to American copyrights and had no effect on foreign countries. But the appeals court said that was not how Congress intended termination to work."

Britain seeks 'reset' in copyright battle between AI and creators; Reuters, January 13, 2026

 Reuters; Britain seeks 'reset' in copyright battle between AI and creators

"British technology minister Liz Kendall said on Tuesday the government was seeking a "reset" on plans to overhaul copyright rules to accommodate artificial intelligence, pledging to protect creators while unlocking AI's economic potential.

Creative industries worldwide are grappling with legal and ethical challenges posed by AI systems that generate original content after being trained on popular works, often without compensating the original creators."

Arkansas begins new search for ‘monument to the unborn’ design after artist seeks copyright; Arkansas Advocate, January 13, 2026

 TESS VRBIN, Arkansas Advocate; Arkansas begins new search for ‘monument to the unborn’ design after artist seeks copyright

"Efforts to build a “monument to the unborn” on the state Capitol grounds advocated by abortion opponents hit a new stumbling block Tuesday when the secretary of state began looking for new designs for the memorial.

The Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission voted with no dissent to allow Secretary of State Cole Jester to accept new submissions for the monument after the artist it selected in late 2023 applied for a federal copyright for her design. Jester said that move would interfere with the state’s efforts to market the anti-abortion monument.

“We couldn’t sell a Christmas tree ornament with it,” Jester said. “We couldn’t do so many things, and it would be very problematic.”...

The commission had previously selected artist Lakey Goff’s idea of a “living wall” of flora and fauna for the monument and accepted her suggestion to place it in the grassy space behind the Capitol and to the north of the Supreme Court building...

She wanted to copyright her proposal so it would remain “true to my original inspiration and design, which came from the Lord, the Holy Spirit,” she said.

The proposal had an estimated $900,000 price tag, and Goff said in August 2025 that she expected to have raised a total of $100,000 for the project by the end of October. Act 310 of 2023 established a trust fund to raise money through private gifts, grants and donations, and fundraising for the project began in May 2024...

Commissioner Stephen Bright, a former state representative and the Secretary of State’s Chief Taxpayer Services Officer, told the New York Times last year that he hoped to change the design to reduce its cost to about $700,000. The design would be unchangeable once copyrighted."

‘Clock Is Ticking’ For Creators On AI Content Copyright Claims, Experts Warn; Forbes, January 9, 2026

Rob Salkowitz, , Forbes; ‘Clock Is Ticking’ For Creators On AI Content Copyright Claims, Experts Warn

"Despite this string of successes, creators like BT caution that content owners need to move quickly to secure any kind of terms. “A lot of artists have their heads in the sand with respect to AI,” he said. “The fact is, if they don’t come to some kind of agreement, they may end up with nothing.”

The concern is that AI models are increasingly being trained on synthetic data: that is, on the output of AI systems, rather than on content attributable to any individual creator or rights owner. Gartner estimates that 75% of AI training data in 2026 will be synthetic. That number could hit 100% by 2030. Once the tech companies no longer need human-produced content, they will stop paying for it.

“The quality of outputs from AI systems has been improving dramatically, which means that it is possible to train on synthetic data without risking model collapse,” said Dr. Daniela Braga, founder and CEO of the data training firm Defined.ai, in a separate interview at CES. “The window is definitely closing for individual rights owners to secure favorable terms.”

Other experts suggest that these claims may be overstated.

Braga says the best way creators can protect themselves is to do business with ethical companies willing to provide compensation for high-quality human-produced content and represent the superior value of that content to their customers. As models grow in capabilities, the need will shift from sheer volume of data to data that is appropriately tagged and annotated to fit easily into specific use cases.

There remain some profound questions around the sustainability of AI from a business standpoint, with demand for services among enterprise and consumers lagging the massive, and massively expensive, build-out of capacity. For some artists opposed to generative AI in its entirety, there may be the temptation to wait it out until the bubble bursts. After all, these artists created their work to be enjoyed by humans, not to be consumed in bulk by machines threatening their livelihoods. In light of those objections, the prospect of a meager payout might seem unappealing."

The Trump Administration's Deportation Reels Keep Getting Copyright Strikes for Using Music Without Permission; Reason , February/ March 2026 Issue

 AUTUMN BILLINGS , Reason; The Trump Administration's Deportation Reels Keep Getting Copyright Strikes for Using Music Without Permission

"As masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents deploy to U.S. cities, the Trump administration is also running a social media campaign. Its effort to stay viral online is colliding with copyright law.

Between January 26 and November 10, 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted 487 times on Instagram—more than 28 percent of the agency's total posting since joining the platform in 2014. The posts promote the crackdown by mixing 20th century propaganda with modern memes, and they feature a wide range of popular imagery and audio.

But not all the content they use has been licensed—or welcomed. Several creators have pushed back on the unauthorized use of their copyright-protected work."

ChatGPT creator must turn over 20M chat logs in copyright litigation, federal judge says; ABA Journal, January 8, 2026

 AMANDA ROBERT, ABA Journal; ChatGPT creator must turn over 20M chat logs in copyright litigation, federal judge says

"OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, must turn over 20 million chat logs in its copyright litigation with the New York Times and other news media, a federal judge ruled Monday."

U.S. Copyright Office Announces Webinar on Copyright Essentials for Filmmakers; U.S. Copyright Office, January 8, 2026

 U.S. Copyright Office ; U.S. Copyright Office Announces Webinar on Copyright Essentials for Filmmakers

"The U.S. Copyright Office invites you to register to attend the upcoming online webinar, Lights, Camera, Action: Copyright Essentials for Filmmakers, on February 4 at 1:00 p.m. eastern time. This event continues our educational series designed to teach copyright basics and key concepts to creators within various disciplines.

In this session, join us as the Copyright Office discusses what filmmakers, including producers, directors, and screenwriters, should know about copyright. We will answer commonly asked questions, review educational resources and registration options, and share how the Copyright Office’s Public Information Office can assist along the way. 

Speakers:

• Miriam Lord, Associate Register of Copyrights and Director of Public Information and Education
• Laura Kaiser, Attorney-Advisor, Office of Public Information and Education"

OpenAI Must Turn Over 20 Million ChatGPT Logs, Judge Affirms; Bloomberg Law, January 5, 2026

 

Kyle Jahner

, Bloomberg Law; OpenAI Must Turn Over 20 Million ChatGPT Logs, Judge Affirms

"OpenAI Inc. will have to turn over 20 million anonymized ChatGPT logs in a consolidated AI copyright case after it failed to convince a federal judge to throw out a magistrate judge’s order the company said insufficiently weighed privacy concerns.

Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang sufficiently considered privacy concerns against the material’s relevance to the ongoing litigation in her discovery ruling in favor of news organization plaintiffs in five lawsuits, District Judge Sidney H. Stein said in an order Monday. She rejected OpenAI’s arguments it should be allowed to run a search of the 20 million-log sample and produce conversations implicating the plaintiffs’ works, saying no case law requires the court to order the least burdensome discovery possible."

Nancy Drew Cracks the Case of Copyright After 95 years, the earliest adventures in the mystery book series are now free for public use.; Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2026

 Brenda Cronin, Wall Street Journal; Nancy Drew Cracks the Case of Copyright After 95 years, the earliest adventures in the mystery book series are now free for public use. 

"Nancy Drew has survived some scary situations. But the slender, attractive sleuth has just entered the most hair-raising of all: the public domain.

On New Year’s Day, 95 years of copyright protection under U.S. law expired on the first four books in Carolyn Keene’s mystery series about the fictional detective."

Defendant Tattoo Artist Prevails in Miles Davis Tattoo Suit; Lexology, January 5, 2026

 Michael Best & Friedrich LLP , Lexology; Defendant Tattoo Artist Prevails in Miles Davis Tattoo Suit

"In the case, Sedlik v. Von Drachenberg, 9th Cir., No. 24‑3367 (Jan. 2, 2026), the Ninth Circuit affirmed a jury verdict in favor of celebrity tattoo artist Katherine “Kat Von D” Von Drachenberg in a closely watched copyright dispute brought by photographer Jeffrey Sedlik over a tattoo based on Sedlik’s well-known portrait of Miles Davis. A link to the images of the photo and the tattoo can be seen here (Kat Von D defends use of Miles Davis photo for friend's tattoo | Courthouse News Service). The panel left intact the jury’s finding of no infringement on the ground that the tattoo and photograph were not “substantially similar,” and emphasized that it would not substitute its view for the jury’s on this fact-intensive question."

AI copyright battles enter pivotal year as US courts weigh fair use; Reuters, January 5, 2026

Blake Brittain , Reuters; AI copyright battles enter pivotal year as US courts weigh fair use

"The sprawling legal fight over tech companies' vast copying of copyrighted material to train their artificial intelligence systems could be entering a decisive phase in 2026.

After a string of fresh lawsuits and a landmark settlement in 2025, the new year promises to bring a wave of rulings that could define how U.S. copyright law applies to generative AI. At stake is whether companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta can rely on the legal doctrine of fair use to shield themselves from liability – or if they must reimburse copyright holders, which could cost billions."

 Alyssa Aquino , Law.com; ‘Pirated’?: NY Defenders Face Copyright Suit for Allegedly ‘Copying’ Expert Report

"A researcher in their complaint alleged that the Federal Defenders of New York copied an expert report commissioned by other attorneys directly into court filings for their own case. “When you’re using something in litigation, you usually have a fair use defense, but that’s usually because you’re using it for something different than its original purpose,” said Stacey Lantagne, a law professor at Suffolk University. “But here, [the report] seems to have been created solely for litigation.”"