1. Richard Kadrey, et al. v. Meta
Current Status: Meta opposes Plaintiffs’ motion for leave to amend and seeks a stay. As discussed in December, Plaintiffs filed a motion for leave the amend their complaint by adding claims for contributory copyright infringement based on Meta’s seeding of torrented materials. Unsurprisingly, Meta has opposed this relatively late amendment.
In its opposition, Meta argues that Plaintiffs’ amendment is inspired by another case against Meta, Entrepreneur Media, LLC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., in which a similar claim was asserted. In addition to arguing that the new contributory infringement claim is futile, Meta has asked that the Kadrey case be stayed pending discovery in Entrepreneur Media, arguing that this will promote judicial efficiency. Specifically, Meta proposed that the Kadrey Plaintiffs be permitted to engage in coordinated deposition discovery with the Entrepreneur Media Plaintiffs. After that discovery concludes, Meta proposed that the Court could revisit whether the stay should be extended through summary judgment in Entrepreneur Media.
2. SDNY Multi-District Litigation
Current Status: Discovery disputes continue. The stream of discovery disputes that have been defining the litigation are in full swing. None of these disputes are individually case dispositive. The Times has continued its effort to obtain discovery from the Musk v. Altman dispute by submitting a notice of supplemental authority including excerpts from recently unsealed evidence in that case including Greg Brockman’s diary entries, which included musings on his desire to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company. Additionally, Defendants have submitted a reply in further support of their motion to stay the Ziff Davis portion of the multi-district litigation. Their reply generally accuses Ziff Davis of mischaracterizing the record and of being responsible for delays in discovery by failing to schedule depositions.
Magistrate Judge Wang also issued an order denying News Plaintiffs motion requesting an evidentiary hearing regarding the 20 million chat logs that have been in dispute for months now. Instead, the parties were ordered to continue to meet and confer and to come to the Jan. 15th discovery conference prepared to discuss the substitution methodology that OpenAI used to replace user-deleted logs as well as the redaction process used to anonymize logs. The denial was without prejudice.
3. Concord Music Group, et al. v. Anthropic
Current Status: Plaintiffs seek to depose Dario Amodei as well. As discussed last week, Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen ordered that Anthropic make its co-founder, Tom Brown, available for deposition despite Anthropic’s apex doctrine objections. This week, the parties submitted a joint dispute statement regarding Plaintiffs’ request to depose another founder: Dario Amodei. The dispute follows the usual pattern for such requests. Plaintiffs contend that the executive has unique access to facts (here, information regarding an early plan to train on evidently licensed data that was abandoned in favor of training on unlicensed data). Anthropic counters that such information is accessible through other non-apex deponents and that the deposition should be denied.
4. Sarah Andersen et al. v. Stability AI, et al.
Current Status: Plaintiffs want to amend their complaint. The Anderson Plaintiffs have requested leave to add additional allegations to their complaint targeting direct infringement by several defendants. Although the motion is redacted, it appears to be based on recent discovery that revealed the contents of training datasets related to DeviantArt’s DreamUp product and to Midjourney’s use of the Datacomp xLarge dataset, as well as several other confidential datasets. A hearing on the motion has been set for February 25th.
5. UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs (d/b/a Udio)
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Following several settlements, recent weeks have seen no notable new filings. Within the past month, Plaintiffs UMG Recordings, Capitol Records, Atlantic Recording Corp., Rhino Entertainment Co., and Warner Music all filed stipulations of dismissal, leaving Sony Music Entertainment as the lone plaintiff in the case. A joint status conference previously set for December 12th was cancelled, but a replacement conference has not yet been scheduled. Further updates will follow as the case progresses.
6. UMG Recordings v. Suno
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Over a month ago, UMG Recordings began pursuing the same amendments to its complaint in this matter as it did in UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs, adding additional claims regarding the circumvention of technological measures to download materials from YouTube. Suno then filed its sur-reply which argued that UMG has failed to distinguish between access controls and copy controls, stating that YouTube’s rolling cipher is the latter and thus is not a valid basis for circumvention claims. Additionally, several weeks ago Warner Bros. and its subsidiaries addressed a letter to Judge Saylor stating that they had stipulated to voluntary dismissal with Suno, leaving UMG and other plaintiffs still in the case. This week, like the last, saw no significant new filings.
7. Reddit v. Anthropic
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This week, the parties submitted their Joint Case Management Statement. Currently, the main dispute is whether the case should be removed from state to federal court. Reddit maintains that it belongs in California state court. Additionally, the Court issued a Case Management and Scheduling Order. Under the Order, fact discovery ends on Dec. 18th, 2026, Expert Discovery ends May 17th, 2027, and trial is scheduled for Feb. 14th, 2028.
8. Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. v. Midjourney
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This matter has been slow to start, with filings to date being largely administrative in nature. Late last year, Plaintiffs and Midjourney filed a joint stipulation to consolidate this action with the related action involving Warner Bros. Additionally, the case received a pretrial schedule several weeks ago marking August 21, 2026, as the deadline to file a report relating to the outcome of mediation. Deadlines resume afterward, with non-expert discovery closing on September 21, 2026, and expert discovery closing on November 9, 2026.
Two weeks ago, the Court scheduled an “informal discovery conference” for January 12th, asking the parties to provide a joint status update on January 8th. Although the parties provided such an update, the Court vacated the informal conference based on the parties’ statement that they had resolved the dispute.
9. Hendrix v. Apple
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. As discussed last year, the parties and the Court agreed to relate the present case to another case filed against Apple by Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknick. More recently, the Court accepted another request to relate a case by Tasha Alexander against Apple. At the moment, class leadership has not been determined, with a hearing on Plaintiffs’ motions for leadership set for January 27th, 2026.
10. Disney et al. v. Minimax & Hailuo AI
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This case has seen little recent activity, with no new filings on the docket this week. Months ago, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. filed suit against AI companies offering video generation products. The complaint is similar to the one filed by Disney against Midjourney and has been assigned to Judge Stanley Blumenfeld and Magistrate Judge Charles Eick.