Court cases where AI copyright claims were dismissed (reference)
Ello folks, I wanted to make a brief post outlining all of the current/previous court cases which have been dropped for images/books for plaintiffs attempting to claim copyright on their own works. This contains a mix of a couple of reasons which will be added under the applicable links. I've added 6 so far but I'm sure I'll find more eventually which I'll amend as needed.
1) Robert Kneschke vs LAION (Images):
The lawsuit was initially started against LAION in Germany, as Robert believed his images were being used in the LAION dataset without his permission, however, due to the non-profit research nature of LAION, this ruling was dropped.
The Hamburg District Court has ruled that LAION, a non-profit organisation, did not infringe copyright law by creating a dataset for training artificial intelligence (AI) models through web scraping publicly available images, as this activity constitutes a legitimate form of text and data mining (TDM) for scientific research purposes.
The photographer Robert Kneschke (the ‘claimant’) brought a lawsuit before the Hamburg District Court against LAION, a non-profit organisation that created a dataset for training AI models (the ‘defendant’). According to the claimant’s allegations, LAION had infringed his copyright by reproducing one of his images without permission as part of the dataset creation process.
2) Anthropic vs Andrea Bartz et al (Books):
The lawsuit filed claimed that Anthropic trained its models on pirated content, in this case the form of books. This lawsuit was also dropped, citing that the nature of the trained AI’s was transformative enough to be fair use. However, a separate trial will take place to determine if Anthropic breached piracy rules by storing the books in the first place.
"The court sided with Anthropic on two fronts. Firstly, it held that the purpose and character of using books to train LLMs was spectacularly transformative, likening the process to human learning. The judge emphasized that the AI model did not reproduce or distribute the original works, but instead analysed patterns and relationships in the text to generate new, original content. Because the outputs did not substantially replicate the claimants’ works, the court found no direct infringement."
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25982181-authors-v-anthropic-ruling/
3) Sarah Andersen et al vs Stability AI (Images) (ongoing):
A case raised against Stability AI with plaintiffs arguing that the images generated violated copyright infringement.
Judge Orrick agreed with all three companies that the images the systems actually created likely did not infringe the artists’ copyrights. He allowed the claims to be amended but said he was “not convinced” that allegations based on the systems’ output could survive without showing that the images were substantially similar to the artists’ work.
4) Getty images vs Stability AI (Images):
Getty images filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for two main reasons: Claiming Stability AI used millions of copyrighted images to train their model without permission and claiming many of the generated works created were too similar to the original images they were trained off. These claims were dropped as there wasn’t sufficient enough evidence to suggest either was true.
“The training claim has likely been dropped due to Getty failing to establish a sufficient connection between the infringing acts and the UK jurisdiction for copyright law to bite,” Ben Maling, a partner at law firm EIP, told TechCrunch in an email. “Meanwhile, the output claim has likely been dropped due to Getty failing to establish that what the models reproduced reflects a substantial part of what was created in the image**s (e.g. by a photographer).”
In Getty’s closing arguments, the company’s lawyers said they dropped those claims due to weak evidence and a lack of knowledgeable witnesses from Stability A**I. The company framed the move as strategic, allowing both it and the court to focus on what Getty believes are stronger and more winnable allegations.
5) Sarah Silverman et al vs Meta AI (Books) (ongoing):
Another case dismissed, however this time the verdict rested more on the plaintiff’s arguments not being correct, not providing enough evidence that the generated content would dilute the market of the trained works, not the verdict of the judge's ruling on the argued copyright infringement.
The US district judge Vince Chhabria, in San Francisco, said in his decision on the Meta case that the authors had not presented enough evidence that the technology company’s AI would cause “market dilution” by flooding the market with work similar to theirs. As a consequence Meta’s use of their work was judged a “fair use” – a legal doctrine that allows use of copyright protected work without permission – and no copyright liability applied.
6) Disney/Universal vs Midjourney (Images) (Ongoing):
This one will be a bit harder I suspect, with the IP of Darth Vader being very recognisable character, I believe this court case compared to the others will sway more in the favour of Disney and Universal. But I could be wrong.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5vjqdm1ypo
So far the precent seems to be that most cases of claims from plaintiffs is that direct copyright is dismissed, due to outputted works not bearing any resemblance to the original works. Or being able to prove their works were in the datasets in the first place.
However it has been noted that some of these cases have been dismissed due to wrongly structured arguments on the plaintiffs part.
Posted Jul 7, 2025, 9:37 PM UTC