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Reddit mod ordered to pay Nintendo $4.5 million in Switch piracy lawsuit

2026-09-24T11:51:46-04:00

Nintendo won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch games, as reported earlier by Aftermath. In a default judgment issued on Wednesday, a Washington federal judge also ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of pirated Switch games.

Nintendo sued Williams, also known as "archbox" online, in 2024. In its complaint, the gaming giant claimed Williams became a "leading moderator" of the r/SwitchPirates community, where he allegedly solicited "donations" of Nintendo eShop gift cards and copies of Switch games "to be copied and distributed" on …

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Microsoft says virtually nobody was grabbing NYT articles through its chatbot

2026-09-04T13:10:35-04:00

Microsoft's Copilot rarely reproduces even full sentences from news articles and books, let alone substantive chunks that could substitute for the original, the company says in new legal filings as it fights copyright claims from publishers including The New York Times and book authors.

As part of the lawsuit's discovery, Microsoft provided 8.2 million Copilot chat logs to an expert hired by news publishers. The logs, it claims, were specifically chosen "because they hit on keywords implicating use of News Plaintiffs' websites, and therefore the most likely to contain News Plaintiffs' works." It says the resulting analysis shows that 59,545 …

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The Trump administration is supporting OpenAI in the NYT copyright lawsuit

2026-09-02T12:12:25-04:00

The Trump administration has intervened in The New York Times' copyright lawsuit against OpenAI, making an argument in favor of the AI lab.

The landmark lawsuit, filed in December 2023, alleging that OpenAI unlawfully trained its AI systems on articles from The New York Times and seeks to recoup "billions of dollars" in damages from both Microsoft and OpenAI. This week, the Trump administration filed a statement of interest in the case, supporting OpenAI's argument that it's fair use to train an AI model on copyrighted text.

"The New York Times seeks to narrow fair-use doctrine to exclude the training of OpenAl's large language models (L …

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Anthropic’s $1.5 billion book piracy settlement approved by judge

2026-07-21T12:53:37-04:00

A federal judge has signed off on Anthropic's $1.5 billion class action settlement with authors who accused the company of training its AI models on copyrighted books, as reported earlier by Reuters. In an order on Monday, Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín writes that the settlement will provide "meaningful relief," offering authors around $3,000 for each book allegedly pirated by Anthropic.

The $1.5 billion settlement is the "largest known copyright recovery in history," according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs. A group of authors - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson - first filed a copyright lawsuit against A …

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Here are the 30,000 songs Sony is suing Udio’s AI music generator over

2026-07-20T18:20:34-04:00

Sony Music Entertainment has filed another lawsuit against Udio, accusing the AI music generator of infringing the copyright of more than 30,000 of its songs, ranging from Elvis Presley's Hound Dog to Beyoncé's Say My Name, and Harry Styles' As It Was. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court on Monday, claims that this list represents "only a small portion of Plaintiffs' works that Udio infringed," as reported earlier by Music Business Worldwide.

In 2024, Sony, along with Universal Music Group and Warner Records, filed a lawsuit against Udio and the AI music-maker Suno. After gaining access to Udio's training data through discovery, Sony cla …

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CNN sues Perplexity over ‘verbatim’ copycat articles

2026-05-28T10:08:36-04:00

CNN has filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, claiming that the startup's AI tools generate "verbatim" copies of its work, as reported earlier by CNN. The lawsuit, filed in a New York court on Thursday, also alleges that Perplexity provides users with information locked behind CNN's subscription.

Perplexity, which offers an AI "answer" engine along with the AI browser Comet, is accused of ignoring CNN's efforts "to recognize or block Perplexity's unidentified crawlers" from scraping its content. "Human beings report, research, write, edit, and create the content that Perplexity takes without permission or compensation," the lawsuit claims.

I …

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A folk musician became a target for AI fakes and a copyright troll

2026-04-04T13:57:12-04:00

Murphy Campbell is at the center of a brewing storm around AI and a broken copyright system. | Image: Murphy Campbell

In January, folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered several songs on her Spotify profile that did not belong there. They were songs that she had recorded, but she'd never uploaded them to Spotify, and something was off about the vocals.

She quickly surmised that someone had pulled performances of the songs she posted to YouTube, created AI covers, and uploaded them to streaming platforms under her name. I ran one of the songs, "Four Marys", through two different AI detectors, and it seemed to support her suspicions with both saying it was probably AI-generated.

Campbell was shocked, "I was kind of under the impression that we had a little b …

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Cox Communications not liable for pirated music, Supreme Court rules

2026-03-25T13:03:20-04:00

The Supreme Court has issued its ruling in a lengthy copyright battle between Cox Communications and major record labels, determining that the cable and internet service provider isn't responsible for illegally downloaded music, as reported earlier by the Associated Press. The unanimous decision says Cox "neither induced its users' infringement nor provided a service tailored to infringement."

Several record labels, led by Sony Music, sued Cox in 2018, alleging the company allowed 60,000 internet subscribers to download over 10,000 copyrighted songs illegally. A jury found Cox liable for piracy in 2019 and granted Sony $1 billion in damages …

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AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted after Supreme Court declines to review the rule

2026-03-04T12:00:09-05:00

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case over whether AI-generated art can obtain a copyright, as reported earlier by Reuters. The Monday decision comes after Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist from Missouri, appealed a court's decision to uphold a ruling that found AI-generated art can't be copyrighted.

In 2019, the US Copyright Office rejected Thaler's request to copyright an image, called A Recent Entrance to Paradise, on behalf of an algorithm he created. The Copyright Office reviewed the decision in 2022 and determined that the image doesn't include "human authorship," disqualifying it from copyright protection.

A Recent Entrance to Paradise. | Image: Stephen Thaler / Creativity Machine" data-portal-copyright="Image: Stephen Thaler / Creativity Machine">

After Thale …

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Everyone is stealing TV

2026-07-28T13:15:15-04:00

Walk the rows of the farmers market in a small, nondescript Texas town about an hour away from Austin, and you might stumble across something unexpected: In between booths selling fresh, local pickles and pies, there's a table piled high with generic-looking streaming boxes, promising free access to NFL games, UFC fights, and any cable TV network you can think of.

It's called the SuperBox, and it's being demoed by Jason, who also has homemade banana bread, okra, and canned goods for sale. "People are sick and tired of giving Dish Network $200 a month for trash service," Jason says. His pitch to rural would-be cord-cutters: Buy a SuperBox fo …

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