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July 24, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed certain defendants related to the distiller of Tullamore D.E.W. Irish whiskey, holding that a songwriter who brought copyright claims based on alleged unpaid use of a song in advertisements for the whiskey failed to show that the distilling entities were subject to the court’s personal jurisdiction, despite their corporate relationship to a co-defendant that was not dismissed.
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July 24, 2026
NEW YORK — An artist who created a Styrofoam sculpture of a snake for an Italian adult film star and politician should have discovered the sculpture’s use in another artist’s works featuring the pornographic actress created in the late 1980s and early 1990s long before the filing of a 2021 suit, a Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel found, upholding a New York federal judge’s finding that the plaintiff-appellant’s claims were time-barred.
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July 23, 2026
LOS ANGELES — After Cox Commc'ns, Inc. v. Sony Music Ent., movie and television production companies’ contributory copyright infringement claim is doomed because there is no evidence that Midjourney Inc. displayed copyrighted material or encouraged users to produce it, the artificial intelligence image company says in a motion for partial judgment on the pleadings. Meanwhile, the parties wrapped briefing on Midjourney’s attempt to have a judge take a second look at a ruling limiting discovery into the plaintiffs’ consumer-facing AI uses.
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July 21, 2026
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — X Corp. and a group of music publishers stipulated to the dismissal with prejudice of copyright claims brought against X in a Tennessee federal court, bringing an end to the suit in which the publishers argued that the social media outlet was liable for contributory infringement based on infringing actions by its users.
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July 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated a nearly $12.7 million award to software entities by a judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, holding that the judge improperly used unforeseeable hindsight when assessing the value of a company’s copyrighted software that was infringed by the United States.
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July 17, 2026
LOS ANGELES — A federal judge in California granted an artificial intelligence study materials company summary judgment on direct and vicarious copyright, trade dress and trademark and other claims, finding that it was merely a passive entity with respect to its users’ uploading of copyrighted materials.
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July 16, 2026
NEW YORK — For two years, OpenAI entities misled plaintiffs and the court about the ability to search training data and ChatGPT outputs for plaintiffs’ copyrighted material and destroyed other evidence, the reality of which came to light only during a court-ordered second deposition of the defendants’ corporate representative, news plaintiffs say in asking the federal judge in New York overseeing multidistrict copyright litigation to impose sanctions.
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July 14, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — In a pair of opinions, a Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel upheld a North Carolina federal judge’s preliminary injunction against a Dutch software company accused of stealing a North Carolina software company’s branding, code and trade secrets because the Dutch entity targeted United States commercial conduct but vacated a civil contempt sanction against the Dutch company’s attorney because the plaintiff company failed to show that it was harmed by noncompliance with a court order.
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July 07, 2026
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A federal judge in Florida on July 6 dismissed with prejudice a pro se plaintiff’s copyright infringement claims against pop singer Taylor Swift and related entities, finding that any alleged overlaps between the plaintiff’s poetry and Swift’s lyrics were unprotectable ideas, themes, metaphors, words and short phrases, and that the complaint still did not plausibly plead unlawful copying.
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July 06, 2026
SEATTLE — In an effort to obtain training data for its artificial intelligence, Amazon.com Inc. violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by evading technological measures designed to prevent the scraping and downloading of copyright-protected online works, a trio of content creators say in an amended complaint seeking to represent a class of YouTube creators in a federal court in Washington.
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July 01, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on June 30 denied an application by President Donald J. Trump and others to stay an interlocutory injunction in a case over the president’s ability to remove Shira Perlmutter from her position as the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office.
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July 01, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — The limitations of large language models mean that a proposed witness’s prompting of ChatGPT and parroting of its outputs on whether an artificial intelligence model memorized works does not qualify him as an expert, defendants tell a judge in California federal court.
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June 30, 2026
NEW YORK — A New York federal judge on June 29 asked the publishers of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers why their copyright suit against Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI entities should not be stayed pending resolution of active summary judgment motions in the OpenAI multidistrict litigation.
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June 30, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A pair of judges recently severed defendants in copyright cases involving artificial intelligence companies, finding that similar conduct by the defendants alone does not meet the standards for joinder under federal law.
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June 29, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on June 29 denied a Kentucky mother’s petition for a writ of certiorari, deciding against hearing the mother’s contention that a Kentucky federal judge and the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals wrongly rejected her arguments that that the fair-use provision of the Copyright Act permitted her to request a copy of a mental health survey that was to be administered to students at a public high school.
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June 26, 2026
NEW YORK — News plaintiffs on June 25 responded to OpenAI entities’ motion for judgment on the pleadings by asking a New York federal judge for leave to amend to their complaint to both voluntarily dismiss and amend contributory copyright claims in the wake of recent U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
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June 26, 2026
BALTIMORE — A federal magistrate judge in Maryland granted summary judgment in favor of a music licensing organization and other copyright owners that accused a Baltimore bar of performing copyrighted songs originally performed by a-ha, Cutting Crew and the Dixie Chicks without a license, rejecting the bar’s request for a hearing on damages after it admitted liability.
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June 25, 2026
CHICAGO — An Illinois federal judge partly granted summary judgment to both sides in a dispute over the copyright ownership of four videos after a Chicago-based media outlet separated from another media outlet covering the same area; the judge determined that the plaintiff entity owned valid copyrights for three of the four videos, while the defendant’s use of portions of the fourth video constituted fair use.
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June 23, 2026
SALT LAKE CITY — A federal judge in Utah found that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction to consider a Mandarin language learning company’s claims that the Utah State Board of Education and certain educators infringed copyrighted educational material because the defendants are immunized by the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; the judge dismissed the complaint without prejudice.
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June 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Three advocacy groups filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to consider a Kentucky mother’s arguments rejected by a Kentucky federal judge and the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that the fair-use provision of the Copyright Act permitted her to request a copy of a mental health survey that was to be administered to students at a public high school; the groups argue that confusion exists as to whether state or federal courts can decide fair-use arguments like the one relied on by the mother.
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June 16, 2026
BOSTON — A partially split First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated a Puerto Rico federal judge’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the artist who performs as Ricky Martin in a sprawling copyright dispute involving a song entered into a FIFA World Cup song contest, finding that the judge took “sweeping actions” without giving the plaintiff-appellant a meaningful chance to pursue discovery.
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June 16, 2026
RICHMOND, Va. — A Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Virginia federal judge’s decision to exclude a plaintiff-appellant software company’s damages evidence after it repeatedly failed to meet discovery deadlines, which led to a summary judgment ruling in another software entity’s favor on copyright infringement claims.
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June 09, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held June 8 that a U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge was right to find that the court had no jurisdiction under the Tucker Act to consider a pro se computer scientist’s Fifth Amendment takings claim against the U.S. government because copyright claims against the government can be brought only under the statute the plaintiff used to pursue relief in a series of earlier suits.
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June 04, 2026
ATLANTA — In a matter of first impression, an 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held that a late rapper who was a member of hip-hop group 2 Live Crew lost ownership of copyright interests in the group’s earliest recordings to his bankruptcy estate upon declaring bankruptcy, reversing a Florida federal judge’s finding that the rapper maintained copyright interests.
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June 02, 2026
ST. LOUIS — An Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel determined on June 1 that it lacked jurisdiction to consider a Minnesota federal judge’s entry of sanctions against a man accused of copying business databases and selling data derived from them through a series of web entities; the panel held that the sanctions order was not a final appealable judgment.