Entertainment and Sports Law

A federal judge in the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval to a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a class of book authors who alleged that the artificial intelligence company used their copyrighted works to train its chatbot Claude without their consent. The settlement is the largest copyright settlement of all time, covering 482,460 works and paying authors slightly more than $3,000 per work infringed.

An “agreement between lenders” (ABL) to help co-fund a film production is a common vehicle for sharing financial risk. But what happens when a legal dispute arises between a film-production senior lender who has provided a larger loan amount than a junior lender who has loaned less?

Notable recent court filings in entertainment law.

When The Burial, a film inspired by a real-life court case was released in theaters briefly before moving to Amazon Prime Video in 2023, the reviews were mostly positive. A few of those reviews singled out the performance of Mamoudou Athie as junior counsel Hal Dockins. The real-life Dockins, however, was not as happy with the portrayal of himself in the film. He is suing the producers over alleged unauthorized use of his name, image and likeness.

In 1997, Supertramp members Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies, the band’s main songwriters, agreed to share their songwriting and publishing income with the group’s three other members — John Helliwell, Robert Siebenberg and Douglas Thomson — and their personal manager David Margereson. But there was one key point missing in the participation memorandum: The agreement didn’t state how long it would remain in effect. It wasn’t until August 2025 that the issue was decided, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

How are copyright holders to prove their works were used to train AI models if the details about the vast data sets used for such training are kept secret? That dilemma surfaced when a California federal judge recently dismissed a claim of direct infringement raised by a group of authors.

A look at moves among attorneys, law firms, companies and other players in entertainment law.

The Nashville federal court where the lawsuit was filed summarized the litigation as “concern[ing] the rights to a prolific composer’s music, a dizzying estate plan, and two descendants at odds over how to manage the royalties those compositions earn.”