1. Richard Kadrey, et al. v. Meta
Current Status: Plaintiffs say “no harm, no foul” in arguing for amended pleadings despite inexcusable delay. The Kadrey Plaintiffs have moved to amend their complaint to add contributory infringement and uploading-based claims. Plaintiffs also asked for concurrent briefing on summary judgment regarding liability as well as for class certification. Meta instead wanted to stay the case until the court rules on summary judgment motions. Last week, Judge Chhabria denied the request for a stay and asked for additional briefing due from Meta (on February 13th) and Plaintiffs (on February 20th).
This week, Plaintiffs filed their supplemental briefing in which they argued that despite the Court’s finding that their delay in amending their complaint was “inexcusable,” the amendment should still be permitted because Meta would not be prejudiced and because the delay was not the result of bad faith on Plaintiffs’ part. We’ll see if the court feels generous, but the court’s previous ruling that Plaintiffs’ delay was inexcusable doesn’t bode well.
In other news, the newly added Plaintiff, Entrepreneur Media, LLC, filed a statement regarding case scheduling. Entrepreneur explained that their need for discovery regarding torrenting an uploading—the same discovery that the Kadrey Plaintiffs have requested—would not be well-served by the current discovery cut-off, which is tailored to the Kadrey Plaintiffs’ distribution claims. Although Entrepreneur only lightly touched on the dispute between the Kadrey Plaintiffs and Meta, it is possible that addition to the case favors a more permissive ruling with respect to the existing plaintiffs.
2. SDNY Multi-District Litigation
Current Status: Second verse, same as the first – more discovery disputes. In yet another week of discovery disputes, Ziff Davis filed a status report alongside OpenAI regarding their ongoing efforts to obtain responses to their interrogatories, search results for their content in OpenAI’s training data, and production of training data using the Databricks or Snowflakes tools (which Ziff says it became aware of through deposition testimony). OpenAI sent their own letter arguing that Ziff’s request amounted to a burdensome, months-long engineering project because it involved either searching their entire training data set or, alternatively, setting up a new training data inspection environment. OpenAI noted that prior searches performed for News Plaintiffs did not involve its entire training set.
Separately, Microsoft submitted a letter arguing that Class Plaintiffs should not be permitted to obtain financial records of Microsoft’s entire suite of M365 products. According to Microsoft, there is little connection between the M365 products and the copyright claims at issue. Plaintiffs’ request is unsurprising given Microsoft’s statement early this year that the “Microsoft 365 (Office) app is now called the Microsoft 365 Copilot app” to reflect Microsoft’s integration of LLMs into its suite of products.
Other letters filed this week included an objection by OpenAI to Plaintiffs’ efforts to obtain access to the journal of OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and OpenAI’s continued opposition to Plaintiffs’ push for materials related to Project Giraffe (OpenAI’s internal efforts to prevent its products from reproducing copyright-infringing training contents).
3. UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs (d/b/a Udio)
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Following a number of 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. Several weeks ago, the Court granted a three-month extension to complete document production, but no significant new filings have made their way to the docket since.
4. UMG Recordings v. Suno
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This case has been in the same position as UMG Recordings v. Uncharted Labs for some time. Various plaintiffs have stipulated to dismissal, leaving Sony still in the case. Since then, updates have been few and far between. Last week, Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson scheduled a status conference for February 11th which may provide more insight into the current status of the case, but that conference has been rescheduled for March 12th as of the last update.
5. Concord Music Group, et al. v. Anthropic
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Several weeks ago, the Court ordered Plaintiffs to respond to Anthropic’s motion for relief from the Magistrate Judge’s order regarding investigative prompts and outputs. Anthropic had previously requested an order that Plaintiffs must produce the prompts which they used to investigate Claude’s ability to output lyrics. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen took a middle path in ruling on this motion, ordering the production of post-suit investigatory prompts and denying access to pre-suit prompts. Anthropic’s motion for relief argued that, in order to mount an effective defense, they needed to be able to distinguish prompts which were crafted by Plaintiffs from those which were the result of disinterested third parties. Although the parties have submitted additional briefing on the topic, no order has been entered yet and this past week saw no significant new filings.
6. Sarah Andersen et al. v. Stability AI, et al.
Current Status: Status conference held, but no significant developments. This week, the parties attended a Discovery Status Conference to discuss ongoing disputes. These disputes included efforts to obtain training data from Stability and the designation of additional document custodians by Midjourney. Additionally, Defendants have alleged that Plaintiffs’ identification of first publication dates for the works in dispute were deficient. The Court ordered the parties to continue meeting and conferring, although it set deadlines for late February and early March for the parties to file briefing if a resolution could not be reached.
7. Reddit v. Anthropic
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. As discussed previously, the main dispute in this case is presently whether it should be removed to federal court from California state court. There have been no new developments this week, but three weeks ago the Court issued a series of questions to both parties to assist with deciding that issue. Those questions included whether Reddit’s content falls within the subject matter of copyright under 17 U.S.C. §§ 102-103 and requests for legal precedent to clarify issues related to various common law claims raised by Reddit.
The following week, Reddit and Anthropic both submitted answers to the Court’s questions. Reddit clarified the nature of its dispute, explaining that although much of Reddit’s content—namely the posts, images, and comments users submit to Reddit—is subject to copyright, not all of the information Anthropic is alleged to have scraped is copyrightable. This non-copyrightable information includes factual information such as usernames, upvote/downvote counts, and the nesting of posts and comments. According to Reddit, it is this non-copyrightable information that is especially valuable to Anthropic because it represents statistical information about user preferences (e.g., via upvotes and downvotes). Reddit explained that its claims of breach of contract still reach non-copyrightable information because Anthropic was obligated not to scrape anything from Reddit.
Anthropic appeared to dispute some of Reddit’s allegations regarding copyright, stating that a repository of online content (e.g., the link-sharing aspect of Reddit’s posts) may not fall within the Copyright Act’s protections. Additionally, Anthropic disputed whether any contract existed with Reddit, stating that Reddit’s User Agreement is only hyperlinked on the website but that users are not required to view it, which would be insufficient to establish an enforceable browsewrap contract.
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.
Over a month 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. This week saw no new filings.
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. Based on a hearing held last week, the Court appointed William Dreher from Keller Rohrback and Rohit Nath from Susman Godfrey as interim co-lead counsel. This appointment will be in effect for one year, through the end of January 2027, with reappointment submissions scheduled for the last Friday of December.
Last week the parties filed an amended complaint which included additional factual allegations regarding the ways in which Apple integrates its models into its products and the manner in which these models have impaired the market for Plaintiffs’ works. These later additions are likely setup for exactly the argument that Kadrey’s Judge Chhabria suggested the plaintiffs in that case should have made to overcome the fair use defense raised by Meta. In particular, the Hendrix class members discuss the manner in which generative AI outputs compete with human authors’ work product based on a 2025 working paper.
This week saw no new filings.
10. Disney et al. v. MiniMax & Hailuo AI
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past 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.
This case has seen little recent activity. In late January, Disney submitted a status report in which it reemphasized its ongoing effort to serve defendants under the Hague Convention. The report also explained that Disney has been unsuccessful in locating a registered business in China for MiniMax and believes that it may be a “doing business as” name. Disney believes the most efficient approach is to wait until other defendants appear through counsel so that it can determine the proper identity of the various defendants. This week, however, included no significant new filings.