By Oscar Hidalgo
@redlineproject
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Summary: Generative AI tools such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, Suno, and Udio, are facing a major lawsuit over copyright infringement from the media, authors, the entertainment and music industries. These lawsuits highlight ongoing ethical and legal debate about fair use, compensation for creative work, and the future of journalism and other industries.
In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has changed the media landscape, allowing Generative AI developers to create journalism with text, voices, images and more. With this powerful tool, development with tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Midjourney Anthropic, and Suno have brought attention to major organizations: media, book authors, music, and writers have filed lawsuits for copyright infringement on journalistic work. This raises a question whether AI developers should be allowed to train language models on journalistic work without compensation.
Lawsuits filed by The New York Times, Disney, Universal, multiple authors, and major record labels such as Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment show how Generative AI is impacting the journalism and entertainment industries.
Generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, Anthropic’s Claude, Midjourney, Suno and Udio are trained on huge datasets scraped from across the internet. These datasets are included as copyrighted works for news articles, books, music, video and photos. The model’s performance depends on the reach and quality of the material. This clear use of copyrighted material to train Al models presents a clouded legal situation that starts to raise the question about fair use versus copyright infringement.
The New York Times vs. OpenAI and Microsoft
Filed in December 2023, The New York Times was the first U.S media and publishing company to file a lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft over copyright infringement for using its written work to train their Generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot. The Times said that “millions of articles were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.” The lawsuit, which is attempting billions of dollars in damages, intends to “get rid of any chatbot models and training data that used copyright material from the New York Times.” This raises concerns about copyright infringement and unfair compensation toward the brand.
17 Authors vs. OpenAI
Just like the New York Times case, multiple authors and The Authors Guild, have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI for using their books without authority. According to a 2025 Publishing Research article, Authors Guild is the nation’s oldest and largest professional authors organization.
The class-action lawsuit called for “Copyright infringement of their works of fiction on behalf of a class of fiction writers whose works have been used to train GPT … violating copyright and undermining the value of the author’s creative work.” While authors and journalists work in different markets, their legal arguments cross, with both arguing that unlicensed exploitation of their work threatens the value and control of creative outputs.
Anthropic Agreement
Anthropic was founded in 2021 and became one of most leading development companies of Generative AI. Amazon, Google, and others have invested billions of dollars in Anthropic. According to a 2025 article by The New York Times, Anthropic “has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors and publishers after a judge ruled it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyright books.” This settlement became the largest U.S. payout agreement over a copyright case in history so far.
“This is massive,” said Chad Hummel, a trial lawyer with the firm McKool Smith, which isn’t involved in the case who spoke to the New York Times about the ruling. “This will cause Generative AI companies to sit up and take notice.” The ruling settlement happened in June by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In a summary reason, Alsup ruled that “when Anthropic acquired copyrighted books legally, the law allowed the company to train AI tech using the books because this transformed them into something new.”
However, the judge also found that “Anthropic had illegally acquired millions of other books online, that many tech companies have used to supplement the huge amounts of digital text to train AI, and when Anthropic downloaded these libraries, the judge ruled its executives knew they contained pirated books.” This Anthropic settlement demonstrates how quickly Generative AI has overtaken the legal structure. The ruling explains that how AI training data is active vs. through piracy it’s critical to its legality creating a precedent that holds AI companies accountable. This sends an understandable message to AI developers that innovation doesn’t excuse infringement on authors’ rights.
Disney and Universal vs. Midjourney
News media, publishers and authors are not the only ones filing lawsuits against Generative AI developers for copyright infringement. The popular AI company Midjourney is a generative software system that is capable of creating images based on entering your text. According to a recent NPR article from June 2025, The Hollywood entertainment media, including streaming Disney and Universal, are suing AI firm Midjourney for copyright infringement.
The 110-page lawsuit, is accusing Midjourney, for “Copyrighted works to train its AI engine of AI generation images, and gives details how Midjourney alleged infringement of popular Disney and Universal figures, including Shrek, Homer Simpson, Darth Vader and more. This lawsuit represents the next stage of legal and ethical challenges facing journalism, creative writing, and media companies.
Music Industry of Copyright
In addition to journalism, media news, authors, and entertainment media are not the only ones suing for copyright infringement. According to the BBC news from 2024 the three largest U.S record labels Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment have filed lawsuits over copyright infringement against two Artificial Intelligence music developers: Suno and Udio.
These AI music companies allow users to generate musical recordings based on text prompts, including by genre and topic. The Music Groups “claims the pair’s software steals music to spit out similar work and asked for compensation of $150,000 per work.” The lawsuit against Suno and Udio alerts a growth of AI copyright infringement into the music industry, reflecting a problem familiar to journalists.
This lawsuit says that AI systems trained on written work, with these music generators are using copyright material without permission. The music industry is represented by record labels and it is now challenging that artists and producers of which they work for are being used as training data. This legal outcome could set a major precedent for all creative industries, possibly forcing AI developers to take on a licensing copy that pays creators for the use of their work as training data. The determination of these cases will have a broad connection for all creative work, from words to music to art is safe in the age of AI in the future.
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Expert perspective
Dr. Zach McDowell, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at UIC, researches how information, technology, and policy shape the production and exclusion of knowledge. McDowell works with media equity, data provenance and AI’s societal impacts.
When first asked how lawsuits like the New York Times vs. OpenAI might shape the future of copyright law for journalism, McDowell said “it’s very interesting, it’s going to shape everything in data, and everyone is paying attention to it.”
McDowell said AI training on journalism does not qualify as fair use. “I think it’s a complicated question [and] that’s why the New York Times vs. OpenAI lawsuit is interesting. This will change everything. Right now, AI firms don’t care.”
When asked if precedent could set these cases for AI firms handling copyright materials going forward, McDowell said: “No Problem. The system will balance itself” If the future licensing or regulatory framework is involved to balance innovation with journalism right?
McDowell emphasized AI’s value as a “tool to help journalists, for example, to organize sources, summarize a source, and help to stay organized.” On ethics standards, he highlights the importance of “demanded transparency” for media organizations engaging with AI developers.
McDowell was asked if AI companies win these lawsuits, what might that mean for local or independent news outlets. “It looks like AI companies are going to lose them,” he said.
He also noted that journalism schools are already adapting to AI: “AI is shaping universities and programs now.”
Will courts treat training data the same way as quoting or excerpting in reporting? McDowell said he didn’t know, but when asked where the laws lay behind technology, he answered with a strong response: “it’s a moving target, and we need to think about human rights now.”
McDowell’s answer shows concerns that technology is moving faster than law, raising questions about fairness, copyright infringement, and forcing society to rethink human rights.
Conclusion
If courts favor AI developers, media outlets and publishers may lose the protections that help them report the news. If publishers win, the media industry could secure new revenue and protections. The lawsuits between AI developers and media publishers is not just copyright, they are about the ownership of their reports itself.
As lawsuits like The New York Times vs. OpenAI, and Disney/Universal vs. Midjourney, book authors suing OpenAI, even the music industry suing AI developers unroll, the tide for journalism could be higher. As McDowell said, these fights are “moving targets,” but forces society to confront questions of human rights, authorship and transparency. The future of journalism and of AI itself will depend on whether innovation can live with fairness, and whether the digital age of generative AI continues to value the labor of those who report, verify and tell the world’s news stories.
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