A current work-for-hire dispute over rights to the musical adaptation, cast album compositions and sheet music based on the children’s horror novel Goosebumps: Phantom of the Auditorium explores the inter-relationship of work-for-hire and copyright-ownership language in agreements signed both before and after the Goosebumps play was created.
Following what has become a global trend, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that EU copyright law allows the bloc’s member countries, including Italy, to require platforms like Meta to negotiate compensation with news publishers for online press content.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit recently held that a cease-and-desist letter can establish personal jurisdiction, finding that cease-and-desist letters sent to Floridian licensees that went beyond merely informing others of the sender’s intellectual property rights are sufficient to establish the minimum contacts necessary to exercise personal jurisdiction over nonresident defendants.
A proposed class action filed against Meta Platforms in New York federal court targets not only the company and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg but also two former senior AI researchers by name — an unusual move that could signal a new front in the wave of copyright litigation against artificial intelligence companies.
Mass web-scraping for AI training, authorship of AI-generated works, and the scope of fair use in data-hungry systems are reshaping what “copyright risk” even means for a business. Companies that treat copyright as a mere box-checking exercise, or that assume long-standing internal practices are low-risk, increasingly find themselves out of step with how courts and regulators are thinking about AI-driven uses of content.
The legal landscape around AI and copyright remains unsettled. Forward-looking businesses will not wait for definitive case law on every issue. Instead, they will treat AI as a catalyst to modernize copyright governance: tightening practices around online content, revisiting license strategies, and building internal literacy about how copyright really works in an AI-saturated environment.
The annals of copyright decisions could provide a reasonably representative catalog of what our culture has been up to over the past 200 years. A Feb. 3 decision from the Southern District of New York is a case in point. It involves a sex-trafficking conspiracy, Tweets attacking a troubled crypto firm, and a claimed transfer of copyright ownership through a restitution order in a criminal case, all over an undercurrent of competing First Amendment and victim-privacy concerns.
The Court held that intent is required and that mere awareness of infringement does not establish secondary liability.
The Court held that intent is required and that mere awareness of infringement does not establish secondary liability.
On Dec. 1, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Cox Communications Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment. The case turned on whether Internet Service Providers could be “contributorily liable for copyright infringement, when the provider knew that specific subscribers were using its service to flagrantly infringe and continued to supply those repeat infringers with service.”
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