Top Ten Noteworthy Copyright Stories from July 2025
After being dormant for much of the year, Congress was very busy on copyright issues in July—introducing copyright-related legislation and holding a hearing on AI and copyright piracy issues. There were many more significant copyright-related events in July. Here is a quick snapshot of top ten copyright news stories from July 2025.
SJC Crime Subcommittee Holds AI and Copyright Hearing
On July 16, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s (SJC) Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training. Witnesses included Maxwell Pritt, Partner, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP; Michael Smith, Professor of Information Technology and Marketing, Carnegie Mellon University; David Baldacci, bestselling author; Bhamati Viswanathan, Professor of Law, New England Law School; and Edward Lee, Professor of Law, Santa Clara University School of Law. The hearing investigated how artificial intelligence (AI) companies are mass ingesting copyrighted material, often obtaining it from pirated sources, to train large language models (LLMs), and whether such practices fall under the legal defense of fair use or amount to criminal copyright infringement. The hearing revealed bipartisan consensus on the need to protect creators from AI companies’ unlicensed use of copyrighted works. Senator Hawley stated during the hearing: “We have got to do something to protect the people of this country. I’m all for innovation, but not at the price of illegality. I’m all for innovation, but not at the price of destroying the intellectual property of the average man and woman in this country. We have laws for a reason—those laws ought to be enforced. Big Tech should not be above the law. Enough is enough. It is time to enforce the law.” Baldacci stated during the hearing: “[] the uncertainty of stealing stuff from pirate sites operated in Russia just so you can gain an advantage and you don’t really care about what happens to the likes of me and other writers coming up . . . I make a lot of money for my publishers, and my publishers use that money to take risks on new writers coming up that they ordinarily would not have been able to take a risk on. So, when you hurt established writers like me, you hurt all the other writers coming behind us.” The Copyright Alliance wrote a summary blog post about the hearing, submitted a hearing statement for the record, and issued a press release.
Trump Administration Unveils AI Action Plan
On July 23, the Trump Administration unveiled its AI action plan titled Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan. The 23-page report is made up of three “pillars,” which will be accompanied by executive orders. In terms of intellectual property, the plan states: “[i]t is also essential for the U.S. government to effectively address security risks to American AI companies, talent, intellectual property, and systems.” There is no explicit reference to copyright in the plan which, according to Director of the Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) Michael Kratsios who discussed this issue at a fireside chat event hosted the week after, was because there wasn’t much the executive branch could do about the fair use/training issues, since understanding and interpreting the fair use issues would be done by the courts, or possibly Congress.
Senator Welch Introduces AI Copyright Transparency Bill
On July 24, Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) introduced S.2455, the Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks Act, (the TRAIN Act), along with Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Josh Hawley (R-MO), and Adam Schiff (D-CA). The TRAIN Act provides an administrative subpoena process to assist copyright owners in determining which of their copyrighted works have been used in the training of AI models. In a statement, Senator Welch said, “This is simple: if your work is used to train AI, there should be a way for you, the copyright holder, to determine that it’s been used by a training model, and you should get compensated if it was. We need to give America’s musicians, artists, and creators a tool to find out when AI companies are using their work to train models without artists’ permission,” said Senator Welch. “As AI evolves and gets more embedded into our daily lives, we need to set a higher standard for transparency. I’m proud to introduce this bipartisan bill to safeguard creators and their incredible contributions to our country.” The Copyright Alliance issued a statement regarding the bill.
Senators Introduce Framework to Combat Foreign Online Piracy
On July 30, Senators Tillis (R-NC), Coons (D-DE), Blackburn (R-TN), and Schiff (D-CA) released a discussion draft of the Block Bad Electronic Art and Recording Distributors (Block BEARD) Act of 2025 bipartisan legislation that would allow copyright owners to seek U.S. federal court action to block dedicated foreign online piracy operations from making pirated content available to American households. The Copyright Alliance issued a statement in support of the discussion draft, with CEO, Keith Kupferschmid saying: “The Copyright Alliance thanks Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Chris Coons (D-DE), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) for their commitment to protecting consumers, creators, and markets by combating foreign-based commercial scale piracy. The Block BEARD Act would empower U.S. federal courts to address foreign piracy while preserving the protections contained in the DMCA, free speech, and an open and secure internet. Similar mechanisms have proven effective in dozens of countries worldwide, and we look forward to working with the senators, as well as with other policymakers and stakeholders, to ensure that carefully tailored legislation that protects the United States from foreign-based commercial scale piracy becomes law.” More information can be found in Senator Tillis’ press release.
Sens. Hawley and Blumenthal Introduce AI Personal Data Protection Bill
On July 21, Senators Hawley (R-MO) and Blumenthal (D-CT) introduced S. 2367 the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act,which seeks to “establish a Federal tort relating to the appropriation, use, collection, processing, sale, or other exploitation of individuals’ data without express, prior consent.” Data covered by the bill includes information, data, or material that is protected by copyright that also includes personally identifiable information, biometric information, unique identifiers, or other kinds of identifying information.
Court Partially Grants and Denies Motion to Dismiss Claims in Voice-Actors’ AI Class Action Lawsuit
On July 10, the district court for the Southern District of New York granted in part and denied in part a motion to dismiss made by voice technology company, Lovo, in the class-action lawsuit filed against it by voice-over actors, Paul Lerhman and Linnea Sage, over the unauthorized use of the plaintiffs’ recordings and voices to create and market Lovo’s AI-voice generator product, Genny AI. On copyright infringement claims, the plaintiffs allege that the voice recordings they provided to Lovo were reproduced during the training process to develop Genny AI. The court permitted the lawsuit to move forward on direct copyright infringement claim regarding Lovo’s use of the voice recordings in Lovo’s marketing materials about Genny AI.
Class Action Certified in Bartz AI Infringement Case
On July 17, Judge Alsup in the Northern District of California issued an order certifying the class in the ongoing Bartz v. Anthropic AI infringement case. The order explains that “[t]his civil action exemplifies the classic litigation that should be certified as a representative action, for the entire class stands aggrieved by defendant’s downloading of their books from pirate libraries on the internet.” The order is significant because it is the first time a class has been certified in the many proposed class action AI infringement cases, and it means that the number of pirated works subject to statutory damages could be in the millions.
Adult Content Company Files AI Lawsuit Against Meta
On July 23, Strike 3 Holdings filed a complaint against Meta over the torrenting and unlicensed use of 2,396 of plaintiffs’ adult movies to train Meta’s AI models. Strike 3 stated that through its anti-piracy tools, it traced the IP addresses that infringed its adult movies back to Meta-owned IP addresses and that a two year-analysis indicated that off-site servers were being used for Meta’s AI activities to torrent and infringe plaintiffs’ works.
EU Parliament Policy Report Concludes That Commercial TDM Exception Is Not Applicable to GAI Training
On July 9, the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Justice, Civil Liberties and Institutional Affairs released a report titled Generative AI and Copyright: Training, Creation, and Regulation, which explores the applicability of the EU copyright law in the context of generative AI technologies. The report outlines that a broad application of the EU’s TDM exception to permit commercial TDM in a generative AI training (GAI) context would likely not be permitted as copyright exceptions must be strictly interpreted, and that a broad application would also be incompatible with the Berne Convention’s three-step test.
EU Releases Template for Compliance With AI Act Transparency Obligations
On July 10, the EU released its Code of Practice, detailing obligations on safety, transparency, and copyright for providers of general-purpose AI models under the EU AI Act. The transparency section of the Code of Practice merely notes that, “Some of this information may also be required in a summarised form as part of the training content summary that providers must make publicly available under Article 53(1), point (d), AI Act, according to a template to be provided by the AI Office.” On July 24, the EU Commission published the template for general-purpose AI companies to provide summaries of training data for their models as required under the AI Act. The template provides a section for companies to disclose “the main datasets that were used to train the model, such as large private or public databases, and a comprehensive narrative description of the data scraped online by or on behalf of the provider (including a summary of the most relevant domain names scraped) and a narrative description of all other data sources used (e.g., user data or synthetic data).” The template also requires “disclosure of a summary list of the most relevant domain names crawled and scraped from online sources by or on behalf of the provider …” The obligation to provide required summaries of training data under the AI Act is applicable August 2, 2025. For models placed on the market prior to that date, summaries must be made publicly available no later than August 2, 2027. Major AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have signed or will be signing onto Code of Practice, while X stated that it would sign the Code with respect to the chapter on Safety and Security and Meta announced that it will not be signing onto the agreement.
Copyright Events and Deadlines in August
USCO Webinar on Copyright Essentials for Writers
On August 6 at 1 p.m. ET, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) will host a webinar titled The Plot Thickens: Copyright Essentials for Writers, which will be the third session held by the Office in its Copyright Essentials Webinar Series. The event will cover information for writers of various literary works—from novels and blogs to poetry, cookbooks, textbooks, and more. The session will also cover copyright application options and explain how the USCO Public Information Office can assist in answering writers’ questions. The speakers are Jessica Chinnadurai and Laura Kaiser, both of whom are Attorney-Advisors with the Office of Public Information and Education. More information is available on the registration page.
Copyright Alliance and WALA Copyright Basics Webinar
On August 19 from 11 a.m.-1 p.m. ET, the Copyright Alliance and Washington Area Lawyers for the Arts (WALA) will hold a Copyright Basics webinar to cover the essentials of copyright, including what it is, what it protects, how to register works for copyright, fair use, and more. The session will also feature a Q&A period for attendees to ask questions of the speakers.
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