Copyright Cases To Watch in the Second Half of 2024

This article covers several significant copyright cases to watch for this year, including cases involving artificial intelligence (AI) and media companies. The most notable is the upcoming trial between Thomson Reuters and ROSS Intelligence, marking the first jury trial to assess whether scraping and reproducing Thomson Reuter’s Westlaw headnotes to train ROSS Intelligence’s AI-based platform constitutes copyright infringement or fair use.

The article also highlights other key cases, including The New York Times’ lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI over ChatGPT’s reproduction of copyrighted articles, on which Sterne Kessler Director Ivy Estoesta commented, “That one I think is interesting because the complaint was well written, and they prompted the AI to generate portions of the news articles.” She added, “There was always a question of whether or not AI would generate output that is substantially similar to the copyrighted work.”

Additionally, the article covers Andersen et al. v. Stability AI Ltd., involving artists’ allegations of copyright violations by text-to-image AI platforms. The legal community is closely watching these cases as they could set significant precedents for the intersection of AI and copyright law.