The plaintiffs filed suit against generative-AI companies Stability AI (creator of Stable Diffusion), Midjourney (creator of Midjourney), DeviantArt (creator of DreamUp), and Runway AI (involved in creating Stable Diffusion) for copyright infringement, DMCA violations, and related state law claims. They allege that the defendants used their (and other artists’) works to train AI without obtaining their permission. According to the plaintiffs, when the defendants’ AI tools create a “new” work, they are actually creating an infringing derivative work. The plaintiffs seek to bring their suit as a class action on behalf of everyone in the U.S. that owns a copyright in any work that was used to train any version of the AI tools.

Stephen Thaler developed an AI system that created a digital artwork without any human input. The Copyright Office refused to register a copyright in the work because it lacked any human input. Thaler sued Shira Perlmutter in her official capacity as the Director of the Copyright Office, asking the court to force the Copyright Office to register a copyright in the work.

This is the second major copyright infringement suit filed against generative-AI company Stability AI (creator of Stable Diffusion). Getty’s complaint is for copyright infringement, trademark infringement, unfair competition, trademark dilution, DMCA violations, and related state law claims. Getty alleges that Stability AI is building a competing business using Getty’s images without permission. It listed 7,216 of its copyrighted images in the complaint, a subset of the millions it’s alleging Stability AI is infringing. Getty also alleges that its famous watermark is on some Stability AI output images, confusing users into believing the images originated with Getty, and that Stability AI violated the DMCA by trying to remove it.

The New York Times filed suit against Open AI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, vicarious and contributory copyright infringement, violations of the DMCA, common law unfair competition, and trademark dilution. It alleges that the defendants unlawfully copied The Times’ content via their generative AI products like ChatGPT and Copilot. These generative AIs rely on large-language models (LLMs) that, The Times alleges, were built by copying millions of its copyrighted articles.

According to the complaint, Taylor Whitley co-created an NFT collection called Caked Apes, which incorporated some of Whitley’s IP. Whitley and the defendants agreed to split the revenue from sales of the collection, which was around $1.9 million in primary sales and $225,000 in secondary sales. The partnership quickly devolved. The defendants allegedly locked Whitley out of the community (Discord server and social media accounts) and failed to pay him some proceeds from the NFT sales. Whitley sued for copyright infringement, negligent misrepresentation, breach of implied contract, defamation, and other claims.

Quentin Tarantino, one of the most celebrated film directors of modern times, announced plans to auction seven “exclusive scenes” from the 1994 hit Pulp Fiction as NFTs. Miramax sued Tarantino for breach contract, copyright and trademark infringement, and unfair competition, claiming that it held all the rights in the film except for a narrow sliver of “Reserved Rights” held by Tarantino, which didn’t include minting and selling Pulp Fiction NFTs.