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August 4, 2026

Top Noteworthy Copyright Stories from July 2026

by Rachel Kim

July 2026 was full of global copyright activities and news. Long-awaited decisions were rendered in courts in India and Germany in key AI copyright lawsuits. Strong statements in support of creators and copyright law were made by foreign governments in Australia and Hong Kong, where the latter government rejected the idea that copyright law needed an exception for AI training. The U.S. Copyright Office also submitted its proposed fee schedule to Congress, which would result in a 43% increase in registration fees that could take effect as early as mid-November. Here is an overview of key copyright news stories from July 2026.

USCO Publishes Proposed Fee Schedule Increasing Registration Fees: On July 14, the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) published its proposed fee schedule and submitted it to Congress. The fee schedule would raise fees for copyright registration and other services by adopting most of the fee increases set forth in its March notice of proposed rulemaking. The Office proposed smaller increases than originally proposed for fees related to group registrations for updates to news websites, group registrations of musical works on the same album, and filing a notice of termination on paper. The Office reconsidered its proposal to eliminate the Single Application registration option. Although the Single Application will not be eliminated, it will not be incorporated into the development of the Enterprise Copyright System (ESC). At the end of the report, the Copyright Office recommends a statutory change to Section 708 of the Copyright Act to authorize the Register to adjust fees on an annual basis to account for inflation. Congress has 120 days to consider the Copyright Office’s new fee schedule, and unless Congress enacts a law stating in substance that it does not approve the fee schedule, it will go into effect 120 days after submission (i.e., November 12, 2026).

CRB Proposes to Continue Existing Rates and Terms for Physical and Download Mechanical Royalties Until 2032: On July 10, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) published a proposal to continue existing rates and terms applicable from January 1, 2028 to December 31, 2032, for Section 115 statutory licenses for making and distributing phonorecords of nondramatic musical works. Comments are due August 10.

Five New AI Copyright Infringement Cases Filed in July

  • On July 2, a group of textbook authors, including Michael Sullivan, Kenneth S. Saladin, and others, brought a class action lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg over the unlicensed use of their textbooks to train Meta’s large language model, Llama, and stripping Copyright Management Information (CMI) from the works. The plaintiffs also allege that Meta further distributed copies of the books through the BitTorrent protocol. The complaint includes claims of direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, removal of CMI, and distribution of CMI.
  • On July 2, Evox Productions filed a complaint against Stability AI, Runway AI, DeviantArt, and Hugging Face over the unauthorized use of its database of automotive vehicle digital images for AI training. The complaint alleges that Stability AI funded the LAION-5B dataset, which includes more than 100,000 links to Evox’s copyrighted photographs. The complaint includes counts of direct and contributory infringement, as well as Section 1202(b) Copyright Management Information (CMI) violations.
  • On July 10, a group of publishers including Hachette Book Group, Inc., Cengage Learning, Inc., and Elsevier Inc., and author, Scott Turow, filed a class action lawsuit against Google over its unauthorized reproduction of plaintiffs’ copyrighted works through source training data for its Gemini AI platform. The plaintiffs allege that copies were made from literary works sourced for limited purposes for Google Play Books and other Google services in addition to being scraped from the internet, including from pirate sources and paywalled websites. The complaint includes claims of direct copyright infringement and removal/alteration of Copyright Management Information (CMI).
  • On July 20, Sony Music Entertainment filed a complaint against Udio over the alleged copying and use of 30,117 of its sound recordings to train the Udio AI platform. The lawsuit is a follow-up to Sony’s ongoing AI lawsuit against Udio after the court denied Sony’s attempts to include the additional sound recordings in the original case. Sony Music also alleges that Udio acquired many of the sound recordings by stream-ripping videos from YouTube. The complaint includes claims of direct copyright infringement and circumvention of technological protection measures.
  • On July 30, Evox Productions filed a complaint against Midjourney over the unauthorized use of Evox’s automobile photographs and images to train Midjourney’s AI image generator. The complaint details that more than 100,000 of Evox’s VOX’s images are maintained in the LAION datasets, which Midjourney allegedly relied on for AI training, along with additional Evox images that were scraped directly by the company. The complaint includes claims of direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and removal of Copyright Management Information (CMI).

Court Issues Final Approval of Bartz Settlement: On July 20, Judge Martínez-Olguín issued final approval of the $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, bringing an end to a case that represents the largest copyright settlement in history. While the settlement payout of $3K per work (across an estimated 500,000 works) was approved, the judge reduced the attorneys’ fee award from the requested $187.5 million to $101.5. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) issued a statement and the Authors Guild issued a blog post applauding the final settlement approval.

News Corp Countersues Brave AI for Scraping and Selling Its Content: On July 21, News Corp filed counterclaims against search engine Brave AI for scraping, using, and selling News Corp news content and delivering summaries and verbatim copied content to AI companies. In March, Brave AI filed a lawsuit against News Corp requesting that the court issue a declaratory judgment that its crawling, scraping, and indexing activities of News Corp’s news content for an AI search engine platform and search APIs to large language models was fair use. The counterclaims against Brave AI include counts of direct infringement at the input and output stage.

Music Publishers Settle Lawsuit Against X Corp: On July 16, a group of music publishers filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss a lawsuit against X Corp over the unauthorized use of musical works in X users’ posts. In March 2026, the court dismissed the direct copyright and vicarious infringement claims but did not dismiss the contributory infringement claims to the extent those claims regarded X practices on (1) providing more lenient copyright enforcement to “verified” users; (2) failing to act on takedown notices in a timely manner; and (3) failing to take reasonable steps in response to severe serial infringers. X argued that the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Cox v. Sony narrows how contributory liability applied in this context, and that the court must dismiss the lawsuit on those grounds. At the same time that music publishers dismissed the copyright lawsuit, X Corp. dismissed its antitrust lawsuit against the publishers.

Amicus Briefs Filed in Support of Record Labels’ Cert Petition in ‘Vetter v. Resnick’: On July 16, five amicus briefs were filed in support of petitioners-record labels in their cert petition in the U.S. Supreme Court asking the Court to review the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal’s decision holding that a plaintiff’s renewal right covered both U.S. and worldwide rights and that when the rights were terminated, worldwide rights reverted to plaintiff. Paramount, the Motion Picture Association (MPA), a group of intellectual property law professors, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry filed amicus briefs.

House Science Committee Holds AI Hearing: On July 22, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a hearing titled Unleashing the Golden Age of Science: Examining the Priorities of the FY2027 Research and Technology Enterprise, which featured Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), as the sole witness. During the hearing members of Congress raised AI implications for creators and intellectual property, citing legislation such as the NO FAKES Act. Representative Laura Friedman (D-CA) asked Director Kratsios multiple questions about balancing creators and artists’ identity and IP rights regarding AI, and whether copyright owners should share in the value created when their works are used to train AI models. Director Kratsios said these issues were addressed in the White House’s legislative proposals to Congress and that multiple compensation models have been proposed and analyzed but that the administration has not yet taken a specific position on the question. He noted the one area where the administration does have a stated position is that publicly available materials should be permitted for model training, per the President’s AI Action Plan speech. Representative Friedman replied that creators should be compensated when their materials are used to train AI, since “the AIs would not be successful” otherwise.

USTR Takes Final Section 301 Action on Brazil, Citing IP Protection and Other Trade Concerns: On July 15, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) announced in a notice of action that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, acting at President Trump’s direction, has taken final action under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 by imposing a 25% tariff on certain Brazilian goods. The action follows a year-long USTR investigation that found Brazil’s practices related to digital trade, electronic payment services, preferential tariffs, intellectual property protection, and other matters to be unreasonable and to burden or restrict U.S. commerce.

Malaysia Launches Copyright Reform Consultation: On July 3, the Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living Intellectual Property Corporation of Malaysia launched a comprehensive consultation soliciting public comments on changes to its Copyright Act. The consultation covers a broad array of topics, including Malaysia potentially joining the Beijing Treaty and Brussels Convention, addressing AI issues including whether to introduce a text-and-data mining exception for AI use, strengthening protection in the digital environment, implementing artists’ resale rights, enabling certain uses of orphan works, strengthening Collective Management Organizations, and introducing a copyright tribunal. The deadline to submit comments is August 14.

CJEU Rules on Copyright Liability for Websites Using Geo-Blocking Measures: On July 9, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in a final judgment that a website operator that uses geo-blocking to restrict access to a copyrighted work in countries where it remains protected is not liable for “communication to the public” if users circumvent those measures to access the work. The case was brought by Anne Frank Fonds, who owns the copyright to Anne Frank’s Diary, against the Anne Frank Foundation and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences after they published the diary online while geo-blocking access from the Netherlands, where the work remains under copyright despite being entered the public domain in several other EU Member States. The court also held that providers of lawful VPNs and similar technologies used to bypass ineffective geo-blocking measures likewise cannot be considered to have communicated the work to the public. The judgment affirms Advocate General Rantos’ January 2026 preliminary ruling.

China Launches Public Consultation on Copyright Revisions: On July 13, China’s National Copyright Administration (NCA) released a draft document titled Implementing Regulations of the Copyright Law of the People’s Republic of China for public comment. The draft document proposes to make the definition of “audiovisual works” to be technology-neutral, introduces a presumption of copyright ownership where a name appears on a work, and introduces certain attribution and remuneration rights for performers whose performances are embedded in films and television dramas. Comments are due August 12.

Australia’s Prime Minister Supports Copyright in AI Speech: On July 15, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese delivered a critical speech on AI issues and addressed key copyright issues, stating, “No company should use Australian books, music, art, or news to build or train AI without the artist’s control. That includes the artist’s control of the price and value of their work,” and that “[a]nything less is theft.”

Kenyan Copyright Tribunal Opines on Copyrightability of AI-Generated Works: On July 15, Kenya’s Copyright Tribunal ruled in a dispute over copyright ownership of a literary work that AI-generated works are not eligible for copyright protection unless the author can provide evidence of “sufficient human intervention/effort giving the work original character.” The initial dispute involved whether Cynthia Beldina Akoth was commissioned to create a literary work for a series of Bible Scripture Stories for the Aryeh Movement, in which the court addressed the secondary issue of whether the work was protected by copyright at all.

Indonesia Advances Copyright Bill to Protect Creators in the Age of AI: According to reports, the Indonesian Parliament sent a draft bill to its government that amends its copyright laws to address AI issues. Such issues include creating a remuneration right for aggregated, republished, or link-previewed news content and AI training use, stating that the use of copyrighted works to train AI is subject to fair use provisions or license agreements, clarifying that AI-assisted works with meaningful human creative input are protected by copyright but fully-AI generated works are not protected, mandating disclosure of AI use in content, and prohibiting the use of AI to imitate a creator’s “distinctive style.”

French Parliament Passes Live Sports Anti-Piracy Law: On July 21, the French Parliament passed legislation that enables the country’s communications regulator, ARCOM, to automatically send domains and associated domains of pirate websites’ streaming live broadcasts to Online Service Providers to block access to such sites. Parties of blocked domains can appeal to ARCOM. The automated system has been likened to the existing system in Italy that has been instrumental in combatting live sports piracy.

Hong Kong Government Rejects Proposal to Enact AI-Related TDM Exception: On July 23, the Hong Kong Government communicated to stakeholders that its consultation on AI and copyright issues is no longer considering enacting a text and data mining exception (TDM) for the use of copyrighted works for AI model training. Instead, the Government will pursue best practice guidelines to provide practical references for AI companies and copyright owners that ensures compliance with current copyright laws and respecting current AI licensing markets.

Indian Court Preliminarily Rules LLM Training and RAG Use of Copyrighted Works is Not Infringing: On July 24, the High Court of Delhi issued a decision in a preliminary injunction motion in favor of OpenAI in the lawsuit launched against it by Ani Media over the unlicensed use of the publishers’ news content to train ChatGPT and in using for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The court found that OpenAI’s use of ANI’s news content for AI training and for RAG purposes were not infringing and qualified for the fair dealing exception under India’s copyright law. The court first rejected OpenAI’s claims that there was a lack of jurisdiction because the training data was stored on US servers, noting that ANI’s claims were alleging that its news articles were being circulated and reproduced within India as stored training data within ChatGPT and also in ChatGPT output. The court then ruled that in this stage of the lawsuit, ANI Media failed to make a case out of copyright infringement based on allegedly infringing ChatGPT output, because “the illustrations given in the [complaint] are post the training of Open AI’s LLMs and a case for memorization of ANI’s works on the basis of the said illustrations cannot be made out.” Lastly, the court found that OpenAI’s storage of ANI’s works and the use of such works to train ChatGPT qualified for the fair dealing exception. In its analysis, the court cited to the Authors Guild v. Google decision and from district court level opinions in Bartz v. Anthropic, and Kadrey v. Meta to support the court’s view that AI training and the use of the works for RAG had a different purpose and character of use than ANI’s news articles and that ChatGPT responses did not act as substitutes for news articles. The court noted that its decision was based on the current stage of the lawsuit, and “would have no bearing on the final outcome of the suit.”

German Court Rules Against Suno in AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuit: On July 31, the Regional Court of Munich issued a decision in a lawsuit brought by German music royalties collecting society, GEMA, against Suno over the unauthorized use and stream-ripping of songs in GEMA’s repertoire to train Suno’s AI music generator. The court’s decision found that Suno’s AI model itself contained copies of GEMA’s works, thus making the text-and-data mining exception inapplicable. The court also found that the AI output that replicated GEMA’s works implicated the reproduction right. Additionally, on jurisdiction issues, the court reportedly stated that because the Suno model, which contained infringing copies and infringing outputs, was being used and retrieved in Germany, it had jurisdiction over the case, but that training issues were subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The court then surmised whether U.S. fair use law would excuse infringing activities occurring during the AI training process and ultimately concluded reproducing the works using stream-ripping to train AI did not lend itself to a transformative use under the first factor and that such reproduction had a substitutive effect under the fourth fair use factor. The court ordered Suno to provide information on income earned from the infringement. The court will later issue a final opinion, and the decision can be appealed.

VLANY Webinar on Fair Use in Art: On August 12 from 5-6:30 p.m. ET, the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts New York (VLANY) will host a webinar, led by Katie Wagner, Esq., VLANY Executive Director, to educate artists, lawyers, and anyone interested in copyright law and fair use, with a specific focus on how fair use affects visual art. More information is available on the registration page. 

DMLA Virtual Roundtable on AI and Editorial Content: On August 12 from 1-3 p.m. ET, the Digital Media Leadership Alliance (DMLA) will host a virtual roundtable on the impact of AI technology on the editorial content industry. This discussion will be led by Thomas Smith from Gado Images and Jonathan Wells from SIPA USA. More information is available on the registration page.  

Graphic Artists Guild Webinar on AI and Collective Licensing: On August 19 at 2 p.m. ET, the Graphic Artists Guild will host a webinar on how different regions have started to develop policies around AI and what it means for collective licensing. This webinar will educate participants on what collective licensing is, the lengths different countries are going to address creators’ rights when it comes to AI, and how collective licensing helps protect creators’ rights. Rebecca Blake, Vice President for Interstate and Foreign Licensing and Business Development for the American Society for Collective Rights Licensing (ASCRL), will present this webinar. More information is available on the registration page.

MDVLA Webinar on Protecting IP: On August 19 from 7-8:30 p.m. ET, the Maryland Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (MDVLA) will host a webinar to help creators learn how to protect their work in a world where AI is developing rapidly. This event will provide participants with an understanding of copyright law and will address questions regarding copyright protections. More information is available on the registration page.

Deadline for Submitting New and Existing Section 1201 Exemption Petitions to USCO: August 24 is the deadline to submit petitions requesting new exemptions or renewing existing exemptions under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The petitions are part of the U.S. Copyright Office’s (USCO) tenth Section 1201 triennial rulemaking proceeding, which reviews whether certain activities should be exempt from the Section 1201 prohibition on circumventing technological measures that control access to copyrighted works.

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