Tags: copyright

Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the AI chatbot platform Character.AI, alleging that the service hosts bots that impersonate characters from Disney’s franchises, including Pixar, Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The letter accuses the company of copyright infringement and raises concerns about how underage users might interact with these bots. Character.AI has faced prior scrutiny over safety failures involving minors and regulatory attention from the FTC and state attorneys general. In response, the platform says it has removed the disputed characters, demonstrating Disney’s willingness to enforce its intellectual‑property rights against AI firms. Read more

Penske Media, owner of publications such as Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging that Google illegally uses their content and that of other publishers to populate AI Overviews that appear at the top of search results. The complaint says Google's dominance forces publishers to surrender traffic and revenue, while AI Overviews divert clicks away from original sites. Google has responded that its services send “higher quality clicks” and will defend the claims. The case could shape how AI‑generated summaries are licensed and impact the broader relationship between search platforms and news publishers. Read more

Encyclopedia Britannica has filed a lawsuit against the AI answer service Perplexity, alleging that the company displays the publisher’s logos and trademarks alongside AI‑generated content that can include factual errors. Britannica claims this practice misleads users into believing the misinformation is endorsed by the publisher, constituting trademark infringement and reputational harm. The complaint focuses on Perplexity’s use of Britannica’s copyrighted material without permission, rather than on the underlying large‑language model. The case joins a growing wave of legal actions by media firms against AI developers over copyright and trademark concerns. Read more

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement to resolve a class‑action copyright lawsuit brought by authors whose works were downloaded from piracy sites such as Library Genesis. The deal will provide roughly $3,000 per work to about 500,000 authors and requires Anthropic to delete the illegally obtained material. While the company maintains it did not use pirated works for publicly released AI, the settlement ends the remaining legacy claims and marks a landmark moment for AI‑related copyright disputes. Read more