1. Sony v. Uncharted Labs (d/b/a Udio)
Current Status: Sony Fights to Preserve its DMCA Claim. Sony Music Entertainment, the lone remaining plaintiff in the case. Is fighting to preserve its DMCA claim in the face of Udio’s argument that YouTube’s “rolling cipher” is not an “access control” under the DMCA. The DMCA prohibits circumventing technological measures that prevent accessing information. Sony submitted a supplemental filing in connection with Udio's pending motion to dismiss, citing a recent California decision (Cordova v. Huneault) where a court allowed a similar DMCA claim to proceed. Sony argues this case supports its claim that Udio illegally bypassed YouTube's security measures to download copyrighted music for AI training.
In response, Udio filed a letter in further support of its motion to dismiss, arguing the Cordova decision is not persuasive. Udio’s key argument is that Cordova is not applicable because it failed to address a critical distinction in the law—the difference between “access controls” (which cannot be bypassed) and “copy controls” (which the DMCA’s anticircumvention measures do not addres). Udio contends that YouTube's “rolling cipher” technology is a copy-prevention measure, not an access-control measure, and therefore bypassing it is not illegal under the DMCA.
2. SDNY Multi-District Litigation
Current Status: Fact discovery closes, disputes over Professor Goldstein’s depositions continue. Although fact discovery closed on February 26, discovery disputes persist. This week, the New York Times and Daily News Plaintiffs filed a letter motion seeking a protective order to block OpenAI from deposing Professor Tom Goldstein, a University of Maryland computer science professor who served as an expert consultant for Plaintiffs.
The letter explains that Professor Goldstein helped generate some of the AI outputs cited in the Complaints as evidence of infringement. Plaintiffs contend this work is protected attorney work product, noting that the Court has twice denied Defendants’ prior efforts to compel discovery into these materials on privilege grounds.
Defendants contend that Plaintiffs waived the privilege by presenting information about their output-generation methodology through technology presentations to the Court. Plaintiffs dispute this, arguing that the presentations were made under Court order and did not disclose how specific outputs were generated.
On Friday, the fact discovery deadline date, the parties filed a joint stipulation indicating that at least nine depositions originally scheduled for February had to be rescheduled for March due to scheduling conflicts. Key witnesses include former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei, Mira Murati, and Ilya Sutskever, as well as current OpenAI personnel and third-party Boston Consulting Group. Stay tuned as expert discovery kicks off.
3. Disney et al. v. MiniMax & Hailuo AI
Current Status: Plaintiffs Finally Serve Defendants. Months ago, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. filed suit against AI companies based in Asia 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.
In late January, Disney submitted a status report in which it reemphasized its effort to serve defendants under the Hague Convention. This week, the parties indicated through a Stipulation that service has been completed. Defendants’ counsel at Quinn Emanuel accepted service on behalf of all three defendants—MiniMax, Shanghai Xiyu Jizhi Technology Co. Ltd., and Nanonoble Pte. Ltd.—effective February 20, 2026, waiving their rights to formal service under the Hague Convention. Under the Stipulation, Defendants now have until April 24, 2026 to answer, move, or otherwise respond to the Complaint. Notably, Defendants have reserved all rights to challenge personal jurisdiction, venue, and the legal sufficiency of the Complaint under Rule 12.
4. Sarah Andersen et al. v. Stability AI, et al.
Current Status: Anderson allowed to file an amended complaint. This week, the Court granted Plaintiffs’ request for leave to add additional allegations to their complaint targeting direct infringement by several defendants. Plaintiffs filed a redacted copy of their new Complaint on Friday. The redacted allegations are a bit unclear, but seem to be based on discovery that revealed the contents of training datasets related to DeviantArt’s DreamUp product and to Midjourney’s use of the Datacomp xLarge dataset. In any case, leave to file a new complaint is a solid win for the plaintiffs.
5. Richard Kadrey, et al. v. Meta
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This week saw no new filings, so we await the Court’s decision on the handful of pending issues. As discussed last week, Plaintiffs filed their supplemental briefing in their motion to amend their complaint to add contributory infringement and uploading claims. Plaintiffs’ supplemental briefing argues 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. Maybe the court will let Plaintiffs off the hook for “harmless error.”
6. UMG Recordings v. Suno
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. Updates have been few and far between since various plaintiffs stipulated to dismissal earlier this year. Last week, the parties requested the Court to extend discovery deadlines, including pushing the fact discovery deadline from March 6 to June 26. The parties state that these new deadlines will allow time to resolve ongoing discovery disputes that are scheduled for a conference with the magistrate judge on March 12. The proposed schedule also extends various other deadlines including expert reports, expert depositions, and dispositive motions.
7. 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 requiring plaintiffs to produce the prompts they used to investigate Claude’s ability to output lyrics. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen split the baby, 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. However, the Court did approve a joint stipulation extending certain deadlines and pushing the trial date to January 25, 2027.
8. Reddit v. Anthropic
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. The main dispute in this case continues to be removal 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.
9. 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.
10. Hendrix v. Apple
Current Status: No major substantive developments this past week. This case has been on hold for some time now, and this week saw no new filings. 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.
Earlier in February, 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.