Copyright

7 entries between August 2022 and September 2025, 2 turning points.

Turning points

  1. Two federal judges rule AI training on books can be fair use

    Judge William Alsup ruled on 23 June 2025 that training a language model on books was transformative fair use, while sending Anthropic’s acquisition of more than seven million pirated books to trial. Judge Vince Chhabria issued a narrower fair-use ruling for Meta two days later.

  2. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.

Every entry

  1. Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to settle authors’ claims

    Anthropic agreed on 5 September 2025 to settle the piracy claims left standing in Bartz v. Anthropic, paying about $3,000 a work for roughly 500,000 books, some $1.5 billion in total, and destroying the pirated copies. Judge Alsup granted preliminary approval on 25 September.

  2. Two federal judges rule AI training on books can be fair use

    Judge William Alsup ruled on 23 June 2025 that training a language model on books was transformative fair use, while sending Anthropic’s acquisition of more than seven million pirated books to trial. Judge Vince Chhabria issued a narrower fair-use ruling for Meta two days later.

  3. Record labels sue Suno and Udio over training data

    Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings and Warner Records, coordinated by the RIAA, sued Suno in Massachusetts federal court and Udio’s Uncharted Labs in the Southern District of New York on 24 June 2024, alleging both trained on copyrighted recordings without a license.

  4. The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright

    The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft on 27 December 2023 in the Southern District of New York, case 1:23-cv-11195, alleging they trained models on millions of its articles without permission and that ChatGPT and Copilot could reproduce its reporting.

  5. Getty Images bans AI-generated content over copyright

    Getty Images said on 21 September 2022 that it would prohibit the upload and sale of AI-generated images. Chief executive Craig Peters said the policy was meant to protect customers from legal and reputational risk while the copyright questions stayed unresolved.

  6. An AI-generated image wins a Colorado State Fair prize

    Jason Allen took first place in the emerging-artist digital-arts category of the Colorado State Fair’s fine art competition with “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”, an image he produced from hundreds of Midjourney prompts and then edited and upscaled.

  7. Stability AI publishes the Stable Diffusion weights

    Stability AI, working with LMU Munich researchers, RunwayML, EleutherAI and LAION, published the full weights of Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face on 22 August 2022 under the CreativeML OpenRAIL-M license. The model ran on a single consumer graphics card.