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copyright

Copyright Violations, Sam Altman Shoplifting, and More

by admin October 1, 2025

On Tuesday, OpenAI released Sora 2, the latest version of its video and audio generation tool that it promised would be the “most powerful imagination engine ever built.” Less than a day into its release, it appears the imaginations of most people are dominated by copyrighted material and existing intellectual property.

In tandem with the release of its newest model, OpenAI also dropped a Sora app, designed for users to generate and share content with each other. While the app is currently invite-only, even if you just want to see the content, plenty of videos have already made their way to other social platforms. The videos that have taken off outside of OpenAI’s walled garden contain lots of familiar characters: Sonic the Hedgehog, Solid Snake, Pikachu.

One shotted Sora 2 output 🤯 pic.twitter.com/vavyEo3CLJ

— Bryan Kim (@kirbyman01) September 30, 2025

Holy copyright infringement Batman, Sora 2 is kinda absurd yet fun , sorry @HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN

“Metal Gear Stranding Relivery” pic.twitter.com/bpzvBykxNi

— Michael Lucas Poage 🐝 (@RubyBrewsday) October 1, 2025

However, often it is quite clear on which movies Sora 2 has been trained on. pic.twitter.com/7pVFMj4l7x

— TestingCatalog News 🗞 (@testingcatalog) September 30, 2025

There does appear to be at least some types of content that are off-limits in OpenAI’s video generator. Users have reported that the app rejects requests to produce videos featuring Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse, for instance. That restriction appears to be the result of OpenAI’s new approach to copyright material, which is pretty simple: “We’re using it unless we’re explicitly told not to.” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that OpenAI has approached movie studios and other copyright holders to inform them that they will have to opt out of having their content appear in Sora-generated videos. Disney did exactly that, per Reuters, so its characters should be off-limits for content created by users.

That doesn’t mean the model wasn’t trained on that content, though. Earlier this month, The Washington Post showed how the first version of Sora was pretty clearly trained on copyrighted material that the company didn’t ask permission to use. For instance, WaPo was able to create a short video clip that closely resembled the Netflix show “Wednesday,” down to the font displayed and a model that looks suspiciously like Jenna Ortega’s take on the titular character. Netflix told the publication it did not provide content to OpenAI for training.

The outputs of Sora 2 reveal that it’s clearly been fed its fair share of copyrighted material, too. For instance, users have managed to generate scenes from “Rick and Morty,” complete with relatively accurate-sounding voices and art style. (Though, if you go outside of what the model knows, it seems to struggle. A user put OpenAI CEO Sam Altman into the “Rick and Morty” universe, and he looks troublingly out of place.)

Sora just dropped Sam Altman into Rick & Morty.

We’ve officially crossed into the multiverse of AI slop, and I love it. pic.twitter.com/HwJdE9GF8V

— SamAlτcoin.eth 🇺🇸 (@SamAltcoin_eth) September 30, 2025

Other videos at least attempt to be a little creative about how they use copyrighted characters. Users have, for instance, thrown Ronald McDonald into an episode of “Love Island” and created a fake video game that teams up Tony Soprano from The Sopranos and Kirby from, well, Kirby.

Sora 2 – Not what I expected.

(5) Dumb / awesome examples.

Prompt:
Love Island reveal scene. A young woman sits on a plush villa sofa during a tense “Movie Night” scene. She watches a large TV screen showing grainy CCTV-style footage: Real-life Ronald McDonald, dashing into a… pic.twitter.com/vNg609MaIJ

— Rory Flynn (@Ror_Fly) October 1, 2025

the gabagool cannon.. absolute PEAK being made with Sora 2

prompt:

“Kirby teams up with The Soprano’s in an all new video game. Japanese TV advertisement” pic.twitter.com/bKyq20Sd3z

— HeavensLastAngel (@HvnsLstAngel) October 1, 2025

Interestingly, not all potential copyright violations come from users who are explicitly asking for it. For instance, one user gave Sora 2 the prompt “A cute young woman riding a dragon in a flower world, Studio Ghibli style, saturated rich colors,” and it just straight up spit out an anime-style version of The NeverEnding Story. Even when users aren’t actively calling upon the model to create derivative art, it seems like it can’t help itself.

⚡ Got access to Sora 2.

“A cute young woman riding a dragon in a flower world, Studio Ghibli style, saturated rich colors.”

Not sure if I should call this overfitting 😋 pic.twitter.com/NPAyjZqtTV

— Javi Lopez ⛩️ (@javilopen) October 1, 2025

“People are eager to engage with their family and friends through their own imaginations, as well as stories, characters, and worlds they love, and we see new opportunities for creators to deepen their connection with the fans,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Gizmodo. “We’re working with rightsholders to understand their preferences for how their content appears across our ecosystem, including Sora.”

There is one other genre of popular and potentially legally dubious content that has become popular among Sora 2 users, too: The Sam Altman cinematic universe. OpenAI claims that users are not able to generate videos that use the likeness of other people, including public figures, unless those figures upload their likeness and give explicit permission. Altman apparently has given his ok (which makes sense, he’s the CEO and he was featured prominently in the company’s fully AI-generated promotional video for Sora 2’s launch), and users are making the most of having access to his image.

One user claimed to have the “most liked” video in the Sora social app, which depicted Altman getting caught shoplifting GPUs from Target. Others have turned him into a skibidi toilet, a cat, and, perhaps most fittingly, a shameless thief stealing creative materials from Hayao Miyazaki.

i have the most liked video on sora 2 right now, i will be enjoying this short moment while it lasts

cctv footage of sam stealing gpus at target for sora inference pic.twitter.com/B86qzUGlMq

— gabriel (@GabrielPeterss4) September 30, 2025

Sam Altman is playing 4D chess. Sora 2 is about to take over social media, the virality is guaranteed once this scales. Billions in ad revenue will flow straight into more compute, fueling the flywheel. In a year Sora 2 will be so efficient and cheap that margins explode. You… pic.twitter.com/cUbmePkwDG

— VraserX e/acc (@VraserX) October 1, 2025

I love Sora 2

Sam Altman must love this too pic.twitter.com/YexwVEoBKQ

— Adyseus (@Adyseku) October 1, 2025

Lmao, Sam Altman stealing art from Miyazaki in the Studio Ghibli HQ.

Sora 2 is wilddddddd. pic.twitter.com/qzhfMs0A2t

— PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) October 1, 2025

There are some questions about the likeness of non-characters in these videos, too. In the video of Altman in Target, for instance, how does Target feel about its logo and store likeness being used? Another user inserted their own likeness into an NFL game, which seems to pretty clearly use the logos of the New York Giants, Dallas Cowboys, and the NFL itself. Is that considered kosher?

The new Sora is amazing, albeit a bit scary for copyright holders @OpenAI pic.twitter.com/ESfzXbYr2z

— Rich Greenfield, LightShed 🔦 (@RichLightShed) September 30, 2025

OpenAI obviously wants people to lend their likeness to the app, as it creates a lot more avenues for engagement, which seems to be its primary currency right now. But the Altman examples seem instructive as to the limits of this: It’s hard to imagine that too many public figures are going to submit themselves to the humiliation ritual of allowing other people to control their image. Worse, imagine the average person getting their likeness dropped into a video that depicts them committing a crime and the potential social ramifications they might face.

A spokesperson for OpenAI said Altman has made his likeness available for anyone to play with, and users who verify their likeness in Sora can set who can make use of it: just the user, mutual friends, select friends, or everyone. The app also gives users the ability to see any video in which their likeness has been used, including those that are not published, and can revoke access or remove a video containing their image at any time. The spokesperson also said that videos contain metadata that show they are AI-generated and watermarked with an indicator they were created with Sora.

There are, of course, some defeats for that. The fact that a video can be deleted from Sora doesn’t mean that an exported version can be deleted. Likewise, the watermark could be cropped out. And most people aren’t checking the metadata of videos to ensure authenticity. What the fallout of this looks like, we will have to see, but there will be fallout.

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October 1, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Tencent accuses Sony of seeking a “monopoly on genre conventions” as it responds to Light of Motiram copyright lawsuit

by admin September 18, 2025

Tencent is disputing Sony’s claims that its upcoming game Light of Motiram is a “slavish clone” of its tentpole Horizon series, claiming the latter is not “fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property” but is instead attempting to “transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets.”

Back in July, Sony filed a copyright lawsuit against Tencent. In court papers filed at the time, Sony demanded a jury trial for copyright and trademark infringement and to prevent the “imminent” release of Tencent’s upcoming title, accusing it of “rip[ping] off” Horizon lead Aloy, “deliberatedly causing numerous game lovers to confuse Light of Motiram as the next game in the Horizon series with encountering Tencent’s promotional game play videos and social media accounts.” Shortly thereafter, Tencent made several changes to Light of Motiram’s Steam page and its promotional art.

Now, as spotted by The Game Post, Tencent claims Light of Motiram is merely making use of “time-honored” tropes that are outside “Sony’s exclusive domain,” calling Sony’s copyright claims “startling.”

“Plaintiff Sony has sued a grab-bag of Tencent companies – and ten unnamed defendants – about the unreleased video game Light of Motiram, alleging that the game copies elements from Sony’s game Horizon Zero Dawn and its spinoffs,” Tencent’s lawyers wrote.

“At bottom, Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property. It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain.”

The court papers further assert that Horizon Zero Dawn’s art director, Jan-Bart Van Beek, suggested in a documentary that the game’s premise was not original, and referenced 2013’s Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

“Long before this lawsuit was filed, the developers of Horizon Zero Dawn publicly acknowledged that the very same game elements that, today, Sony claims to own exclusively, were in fact borrowed from an earlier game.

“Sony’s Complaint tellingly ignores these facts. Instead, it tries to transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets,” Tencent added. “By suing over an unreleased project that merely employs the same time-honored tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon — like Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, Biomutant, and many more — Sony seeks an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions.”

Tencent also dismissed Sony’s claims its representatives pitched a Horizon mobile game at GDC in 2024, and states Sony is suing the wrong companies as “none of the served defendants develop and market the Light of Motiram video game that Sony alleges infringes its intellectual property in the Horizon franchise.” It also claimed that it cannot be sued for a game that has a release window of Q4 2027 and not yet released.

For more on Tencent, check out our feature, Behind the scenes at Tencent.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Tencent accuse Sony of trying “to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture” with their Horizon copyright lawsuit

by admin September 18, 2025

This afternoon, a choice of two raging videogame lawsuits to report on. Firstly, a snippet from the on-going courtroom scrap between former Unknown Worlds executives and Krafton over the state of Subnautica 2’s development, in which the former accuse the latter of changing their story about why the executives were fired.

I’ve decided not to write that one up because it feels like we are entering the realm of potshots over minutiae, rather than learning anything genuinely new about Subnautica 2 or its creators, but if you’re interested, GamesIndustry.biz has your back. The parallel Tencent/Sony bust-up has the virtue of relative novelty. It gives me a whole different kind of headache. What’s going on with this one, then?

Well, last November Tencent announced that they would publish Light Of Motiram, a post-apocalyptic adventure featuring robot mammoths, archery, red-haired ladies, and scrapmetal tribal aesthetics. An ungenerous commenter might assert that it’s a “slavish clone” of Sony’s Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. That’s what Sony called it, anyway, when they announced in July this year that they were going to sue Tencent back to the Neo-Stone Age for copyright infringement.

In their California federal court filing, Sony alleged that Tencent had, in fact, approached them in 2024 and pitched a new Horizon game under license, even as development continued on Light of Motiram. As James noted in our write-up, the implication here is that Tencent were going to make their very own Horizon game regardless of whether Sony consented to brand it an official sequel or spin-off.

Sony sought to block Light Of Motiram’s release, arguing that it would cause “irreparable harm to SIE and the consuming public”, which is rather histrionic. I am picturing a solitary tear rolling down the face of a member of the Consuming Public as they plead with the storekeeper that they wanted the other 6/10 metal dinosaur game, not this one. Yes, it is I – the Horizon disliker. Still, I can’t deny that the games look rather similar, and it’s telling that Tencent have edited Light Of Motiram’s Steam page to remove some of the more obvious points of overlap with Horizon.

Tencent have now hit back against Sony’s accusations with even louder language. They contend that Sony are seeking “an impermissible monopoly on genre conventions”, and that Light Of Motiram ain’t even finished yet and as such, can’t be fairly assessed for what it invents or borrows. They also say that Sony are suing the wrong people.

As passed on by The Game Post, Tencent’s motion to dismiss the case comments that “at bottom, Sony’s effort is not aimed at fighting off piracy, plagiarism, or any genuine threat to intellectual property. It is an improper attempt to fence off a well-trodden corner of popular culture and declare it Sony’s exclusive domain.”

Tencent further argue that Sony’s claims for Horizon Zero Dawn’s originality have been “flatly contradicted” by developers Guerrilla, citing a behind-the-scenes doc in which art director Jan-Bart Van Beek compared the game to Ninja Theory’s 2013 action-adventure Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. They also make reference to “the long history of video games featuring the same elements that Sony seeks to monopolise through this lawsuit”.

They insist that Light Of Motiram “merely employs the same time-honoured tropes embraced by scores of other games released both before and after Horizon – like Enslaved, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Far Cry: Primal, Far Cry: New Dawn, Outer Wilds, Biomutant, and many more”. In summary, they accuse Sony of trying to “transform ubiquitous genre ingredients into proprietary assets.”

As regards Sony’s argument that Tencent wanted to make a Horizon game for them, and decided to proceed with their “slavish clone” despite not being given permission, Tencent’s court motion refers to a GDC meeting from March 2024 in which Tencent reps pitched a licensed Horizon mobile game. They claim that since no actual Tencent executives or employees were at the meeting, nothing at the meeting “is alleged to be an act of copyright or trademark infringement”.

As for the ‘suing the wrong people stuff’, Tencent’s motion notes that Sony’s lawsuit is against Tencent America, Proxima Beta U.S., and Tencent Holdings, whereas Light Of Motiram is being developed and published by Polaris Quest / Aurora Studios, who operate under Tencent Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, and Proxima Beta PTE Ltd, a company in Singapore “doing business as ‘Tencent Games’ and/or ‘Level Infinite'”. Tencent’s lawyers are of the opinion that “Sony’s threadbare, conclusory allegations improperly lump these Defendants together with the foreign companies alleged to be responsible for the core conduct at issue.”

I’m no lawyer, despite belated efforts to educate myself, but the last two paragraphs read to me like Tencent are trying to get off on a technicality. I sympathise more with the line about Horizon not being as original as all that, and certain ideas being public property. Except that I’m pretty sure that if the roles were reversed and Light of Motiram had launched before Horizon: Zero Dawn, Tencent would have been yelling blue murder about breach of copyright.

The discussion of what Light Of Motiram – out 2027 – yoinks or doesn’t yoink from Horizon is kind of fun to follow, because it’s comparing ideas and aesthetics. In general, though, I default to the position that picking sides in a copyright spat between two billion dollar videogame publishers is like deciding which cybernetic T-Rex you most want to step on you.

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September 18, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to authors whose work trained AI in priciest copyright settlement in U.S. history

by admin September 6, 2025

As reported by the New York Times, AI company Anthropic has agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a groundbreaking copyright lawsuit involving some 500,000 authors. Anthropic illegally downloaded the authors’ books and used them to train its AI model. The total settlement for this case is the largest for any copyright case in U.S. history, although the payout to each affected author is only $3,000.

The lawsuit, filed in August 2024, accused Anthropic of benefiting from pirated copyrighted books, stating, “An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or “LLMs”)—is the largescale theft of copyrighted works.”

It goes on to highlight the harm being done to authors, which goes beyond the theft of their work: “Anthropic’s Claude LLMs compromise authors’ ability to make a living, in that the LLMs allow anyone to generate—automatically and freely (or very cheaply)—texts that writers would otherwise be paid to create and sell. Anthropic’s LLMs, which dilute the commercial market for Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works, were created without paying writers a cent. Anthropic’s immense success is a direct result of its copyright infringement.”

As a result of that copyright infringement, Anthropic has offered to pay $1.5 billion to settle the class action lawsuit before it goes to trial. This case sets a standard for the growing wave of copyright lawsuits against AI companies, but it isn’t as clear-cut as it might look. Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California ruled that Anthropic is allowed to use copyrighted books to train its AI models if it obtains those books legally. The settlement is the result of pirating the books, not feeding them to an AI, which has been ruled “fair use.”

Additionally, the settlement Anthropic offered is a historically high sum, but it’s a miniscule bit of the company’s overall value, which sits at $183 billion at the time of writing. Earlier this week, Anthropic raised more money in a single round of funding than the entire settlement in this copyright case. Meanwhile, the $3,000 for each author impacted by the class action lawsuit is less than a typical book’s advance.

It’s also worth noting that $1.5 billion is actually far less than Anthropic could have potentially been ordered to pay if it hadn’t settled. Willful copyright infringement can result in fines of up to $150,000 per copyrighted work. The pirated data sets Anthropic used contained 7 million books. If Anthropic had been forced to pay the maximum amount for each count of copyright infringement, it could have been financial ruin for the AI company. Of course, the maximum possible fine would have been unlikely, but Anthropic still might have had to pay much more than it settled for.

This lawsuit against Anthropic is just one of several like it. Authors also have ongoing lawsuits with other AI companies, including Microsoft and OpenAI. Back in June, authors lost a similar lawsuit against Meta, but only because the judge ruled that they hadn’t offered enough evidence, stating, “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

Product Reviews

Anthropic will pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion to settle copyright lawsuit with authors

by admin September 6, 2025

Anthropic will pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit piracy lawsuit brought by authors. The settlement is the largest-ever payout for a copyright case in the United States.

The AI company behind the Claude chatbot reached a settlement in the case last week, but terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed at the time. Now, The New York Times reports that the 500,000 authors involved in the case will get $3,000 per work.

The settlement is “is the first of its kind in the AI era,” Justin A. Nelson, the lawyer representing the authors, said in a statement. “This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery. It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners. This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”

The case has been closely watched as top AI companies are increasingly facing legal scrutiny over their use of copyrighted works. In June, the judge in the case ruled that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted material for training its large language model was fair use, in a significant victory for the company. He did, however, rule that the authors and publishers could pursue piracy claims against the company since the books were downloaded illegally from sites like Library Genesis (also known as “LibGen”).

As part of the settlement, Anthropic has also agreed to delete everything that was downloaded illegally and “said that it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released,” according to The New York Times. The company has not admitted wrongdoing.

“In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on AI development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use,” Anthropic’s Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. “Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims. We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”

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September 6, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Anthropic Agrees to Pay Authors at Least $1.5 Billion in AI Copyright Settlement

by admin September 5, 2025

Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement, an estimated $3,000 per work. In a court motion on Friday, the plaintiffs emphasized that the terms of the settlement are “critical victories” and that going to trial would have been an “enormous” risk.

This is the first class action settlement centered on AI and copyright in the United States, and the outcome may shape how regulators and creative industries approach the legal debate over generative AI and intellectual property. According to the settlement agreement, the class action will apply to approximately 500,000 works, but that number may go up once the list of pirated materials is finalized. For every additional work, the artificial intelligence company will pay an extra $3,000. Plaintiffs plan to deliver a final list of works to the court by October.

“This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery. It is the first of its kind in the AI era. It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners. This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong,” says colead plaintiffs’ counsel Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey LLP.

Anthropic is not admitting any wrongdoing or liability. “Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims. We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.

The lawsuit, which was originally filed in 2024 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was part of a larger ongoing wave of copyright litigation brought against tech companies over the data they used to train artificial intelligence programs. Authors Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Charles Graeber alleged that Anthropic trained its large language models on their work without permission, violating copyright law.

This June, senior district judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s AI training was shielded by the “fair use” doctrine, which allows unauthorized use of copyrighted works under certain conditions. It was a win for the tech company but came with a major caveat. As it gathered materials to train its AI tools, Anthropic had relied on a corpus of books pirated from so-called “shadow libraries,” including the notorious site LibGen, and Alsup determined that the authors should still be able to bring Anthropic to trial in a class action over pirating their work. (Anthropic maintains that it did not actually train its products on the pirated works, instead opting to purchase copies of books.)

“Anthropic downloaded over seven million pirated copies of books, paid nothing, and kept these pirated copies in its library even after deciding it would not use them to train its AI (at all or ever again). Authors argue Anthropic should have paid for these pirated library copies. This order agrees,” Alsup wrote in his summary judgement.

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September 5, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Blizzard filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against one of World of Warcraft’s biggest private servers, but the team behind it is putting on a brave face: ‘Challenges come to us often, and each time we are prepared to face them’

by admin September 1, 2025

If you’ve played an MMO for very long, you’ve almost certainly heard the siren song of the private server. These fan-operated servers come in all varieties—some keep dead games alive, some provide a window to a past build of an aging game, and some have even gotten the green light to keep going from the game’s publisher.

Historically, Blizzard has not been so keen on this practice which, in all fairness, involves making big parts of its game playable for free. Its action against Nostalrius, a server that took World of Warcraft back to a 2006 build before that option existed officially, is one of the more notorious private server closures in history.

There’s nothing new under the sun, as Turtle WoW—a private server that launched in 2018 and has reached concurrent player peaks of over 70,000 since, according to its developers—was named in a complaint Blizzard filed Friday that claims the Turtle WoW team has “built an entire business on large scale, egregious, and ongoing infringement of Blizzard’s intellectual property.”

The Turtle WoW build is an altered version of 2006-era WoW offering new playable races, zones, instances, and so on. While it is free to play, it also has an in-game shop that allows donations to the dev team to be converted into store currency. But the more pressing issue is obviously the whole copyright infringement thing, which the lawsuit hammers home hard.

The complaint continues: “These unauthorized private servers drive away otherwise dedicated WoW players, introduce security risks to players, fragment the WoW player community, and create confusion as to what are official, supported

versions of WoW … private servers such as Turtle WoW also encourage and facilitate video game piracy by allowing players to avoid paying for the game experience that Blizzard has invested so much time and money to create.”

Turtle WoW wasn’t exactly in hiding. You may have seen its advertisements on YouTube or on X, where it regularly teases major updates and its impending move to Unreal Engine 5. The team recently launched a new realm, Ambershire, which itself hit an early peak of over 11,000 online players. These are the sort of numbers and ambitions that some officially active MMOs can’t match.

On the server’s fan Discord, team member Torta issued a statement the day after the suit was filed: “Turtle WoW is here to stay. Challenges come to us often, and each time we are prepared to face them. We remain fully committed to delivering the Turtle WoW experience that you’ve come to love over the years.”

As a lifelong fan of “vanilla” World of Warcraft who watched Turtle WoW’s development with great interest, it hurts to see so much passionate work and modding ingenuity get tangled in a legal mess. On the other hand, Blizzard has already proven itself litigious with this sort of thing, and it’s hard to say how the team will keep it going. Private servers have a way of persevering for exactly as long as they can evade the wrong attention.

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September 1, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

Anthropic Settles High-Profile AI Copyright Lawsuit Brought by Book Authors

by admin August 26, 2025

Anthropic has reached a preliminary settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of prominent authors, marking a major turn in of the most significant ongoing AI copyright lawsuits in history. The move will allow Anthropic to avoid what may have been a financially devastating outcome in court.

The settlement agreement is expected to be finalized September 3, with more details to follow, according to a legal filing published on Tuesday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropic declined to comment.

In 2024, three book writers, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic, alleging the startup illegally used their work to train its artificial intelligence models. In June, California district court judge William Alsup issued a summary judgement in Bartz v. Anthropic largely siding with Anthropic, finding that the company’s usage of the books was “fair use,” and thus legal.

But the judge ruled that the manner in which Anthropic had acquired some of the works, by downloading them through so-called “shadow libraries,” including a notorious site called LibGen, constituted piracy. Alsup ruled that the book authors could still take Anthropic to trial in a class action suit for pirating their works; the legal showdown was slated to begin this December.

Statutory damages for this kind of piracy start at $750 per infringed work, according to US copyright law. Because the library of books amassed by Anthropic was thought to contain approximately seven million works, the AI company was potentially facing court-imposed penalties amounting to billions, or even over $1 trillion dollars.

“It’s a stunning turn of events, given how Anthropic was fighting tooth and nail in two courts in this case. And the company recently hired a new trial team,” says Edward Lee, a law professor at Santa Clara University who closely follows AI copyright litigation. “But they had few defenses at trial, given how Judge Alsup ruled. So Anthropic was starting at the risk of statutory damages in ‘doomsday’ amounts.”

Most authors who may have been part of the class action lawsuit were just starting to receive notice that they qualified to participate. The Authors Guild, a trade group representing professional writers, sent out a notice alerting authors that they might be eligible earlier this month, and lawyers for the plaintiffs were scheduled to submit a “list of affected works” to the court on September 1. This means that many of these writers were not privy to the negotiations that took place.

“The big question is whether there is a significant revolt from within the author class after the settlement terms are unveiled,” says James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University. “That will be a very important barometer of where copyright owner sentiment stands.”

Anthropic is still facing a number of other copyright-related legal challenges. One of the most high-profile disputes involves a group of major record labels, including Universal Music Group, which allege that the company illegally trained its AI programs on copyrighted lyrics. The plaintiffs recently filed to amend their case to allege that Anthropic had used the peer-to-peer file sharing service BitTorrent to download songs illegally.

Settlements don’t set legal precedent, but the details of this case will likely still be watched closely as dozens of other high-profile AI copyright cases continue to wind through the courts.

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August 26, 2025 0 comments