Universal Music Group sued the distribution service DistroKid on Tuesday, claiming in a federal lawsuit that the service infringed on the label’s copyright by pumping out “AI-generated ‘slop’ that siphons revenue and listeners from the legitimate artists and rightsholders.” UMG and its Capitol Records imprint claimed DistroKid improperly presented itself as a music distributor dedicated solely to serving artist-created work to distribution platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more.
Source: Universal Music Group Sues DistroKid for Building an ‘AI-Slop Pipeline’
Meta previously argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users was an unavoidable side effect of downloading them, and therefore fair use. Rightsholders suing Meta in three related cases tried to dismantle this theory by asking OpenAI and Anthropic to reveal how they torrented shadow library data. A magistrate judge denied the request, but that’s not the end of the torrenting dispute.
A federal judge has thrown out the copyright claims at the center of Wixen Music Publishing‘s lawsuit against Meta Platforms. Judge John F. Walter ruled that Wixen has not shown it holds the rights that would let it sue over the 681 works it says Meta used without a license across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The ruling knocks out both of Wixen‘s copyright claims: direct infringement by Meta and contributory infringement for what Meta‘s users did with the music.
In the filing, submitted to a New York federal court on Friday (September 4), the union says those deals let recordings made by its members be “fed into AI systems for commercial exploitation.” The musicians have not been paid for that use, the AFM says. Warner settled with Udio in November 2025, then days later became the first major to settle with Suno.
In a class action case filed by the Authors Guild and its co-plaintiff authors against OpenAI and Microsoft, all parties have filed motions for summary judgment. The plaintiffs argue that “OpenAI built the foundations of its business on mass piracy,” which included reproducing and then deleting book content found on the pirate site Library Genesis, aka LibGen. Plaintiffs note that courts have “consistently held that obtaining ‘for free’ something one would ‘ordinarily have to buy’ is not fair use.”
The screen itself is not our enemy. It has brought extraordinary things into our lives. Never before have so many people had access to so many films, ideas and cultures other than their own. It’s clear to all of us that a screen can educate, connect and inspire. The question is how to preserve that promise while confronting what has gone wrong. We should begin by acknowledging something uncomfortable: we shaped this world, and we must take responsibility for it.
Book authors have asked a New York federal judge to rule that OpenAI built its AI models on “mass piracy”. Pointing to internal documents, a summary judgment motion alleges the AI giant downloaded books from LibGen, hid the evidence by renaming datasets, and designed its models to supplant human writers. OpenAI filed the mirror-image motion, stressing that its data harvesting qualifies as fair use.
Court filings made Friday in a closely watched copyright trial pitting The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft invoked a wide range of material, including relevant copyright law, arts and sports. The briefs, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, largely boiled down to two questions: whether the publishers’ news articles were sufficiently “transformed” into an entirely new work by A.I., and whether A.I. produced content that “substituted” for news articles and harmed their value.
A US federal judge has thrown out the copyright theory at the center of the lawsuit that accused Bad Bunny, Drake, and more than 150 other artists of copying the “dembow” rhythm used across reggaeton. Judge André Birotte Jr. ruled that the plaintiffs had failed to identify a single copyrighted work of their own that contains the combination of elements they are trying to protect. The order reverses the decision Birotte issued on July 1, which had left the protectability of the rhythm for a jury.
SOCAN has filed a Suno copyright lawsuit of its own, accusing the platform of unlawfully training on protected works and then generating infringing outputs. SOCAN submitted the straightforward complaint to Canada’s Federal Court today, moments after activist artist David Lowery as well as Latin label Gerencia 360 fired off distinct actions against Suno in the U.S. Despite the clear-cut differences between those plaintiffs and to some extent their precise claims, the suits touch on the same main points.