A tidal wave of copyright lawsuits against AI developers threatens beneficial uses of AI, like creative expression, legal research, and scientific advancement. How courts decide these cases will profoundly shape the future of this technology, including its capabilities, its costs, and whether its evolution will be shaped by the democratizing forces of the open market or the whims of an oligopoly. As these cases finished their trials and moved to appeals courts in 2025, EFF intervened to defend fair use, promote competition, and protect everyone’s rights to build and benefit from this technology.

At the same time, rightsholders stepped up their efforts to control fair uses through everything from state AI laws to technical standards that influence how the web functions. In 2025, EFF fought policies that threaten the open web in the California State Legislature, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and beyond.

Fair Use Still Protects Learning—Even by Machines

Copyright lawsuits against AI developers often follow a similar pattern: plaintiffs argue that use of their works to train the models was infringement and then developers counter that their training is fair use. While legal theories vary, the core issue in many of these cases is whether using copyrighted works to train AI is a fair use.

We think that it is. Courts have long recognized that copying works for analysis, indexing, or search is a classic fair use. That principle doesn’t change because a statistical model is doing the reading. AI training is a legitimate, transformative fair use, not a substitute for the original works.

More importantly, expanding copyright would do more harm than good: while creators have legitimate concerns about AI, expanding copyright won’t protect jobs from automation. But overbroad licensing requirements risk entrenching Big Tech’s dominance, shutting out small developers, and undermining fair use protections for researchers and artists. Copyright is a tool that gives the most powerful companies even more control—not a check on Big Tech. And attacking the models and their outputs by attacking training—i.e. “learning” from existing works—is a dangerous move. It risks a core principle of freedom of expression: that training and learning—by anyone—should not be endangered by restrictive rightsholders.

In most of the AI cases, courts have yet to consider—let alone decide—whether fair use applies, but in 2025, things began to speed up.

But some cases have already reached courts of appeal. We advocated for fair use rights and sensible limits on copyright in amicus briefs filed in Doe v. GitHub, Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, and Bartz v. Anthropic, three early AI copyright appeals that could shape copyright law and influence dozens of other cases. We also filed an amicus brief in Kadrey v. Meta, one of the first decisions on the merits of the fair use defense in an AI copyright case.

How the courts decide the fair use questions in these cases could profoundly shape the future of AI—and whether legacy gatekeepers will have the power to control it. As these cases move forward, EFF will continue to defend your fair use rights.

Protecting the Open Web in the IETF

Rightsholders also tried to make an end-run around fair use by changing the technical standards that shape much of the internet. The IETF, an Internet standards body, has been developing technical standards that pose a major threat to the open web. These proposals would give websites to express “preference signals” against certain uses of scraped data—effectively giving them veto power over fair uses like AI training and web search.

Overly restrictive preference signaling threatens a wide range of important uses—from accessibility tools for people with disabilities to research efforts aimed at holding governments accountable. Worse, the IETF is dominated by publishers and tech companies seeking to embed their business models into the infrastructure of the internet. These companies aren’t looking out for the billions of internet users who rely on the open web.

That’s where EFF comes in. We advocated for users’ interests in the IETF, and helped defeat the most dangerous aspects of these proposals—at least for now.

Looking Ahead

The AI copyright battles of 2025 were never just about compensation—they were about control. EFF will continue working in courts, legislatures, and standards bodies to protect creativity and innovation from copyright maximalists.

Since earliest days of computer games, people have tinkered with the software to customize their own experiences or share their vision with others. From the dad who changed the game’s male protagonist to a girl so his daughter could see herself in it, to the developers who got their start in modding, games have been a medium where you don’t just consume a product, you participate and interact with culture.

For decades, that participatory experience was a key part of one of the longest-running video games still in operation: Everquest. Players had the official client, acquired lawfully from EverQuest’s developers, and modders figured out how to enable those clients to communicate with their own servers and then modify their play experience – creating new communities along the way.

Everquest’s copyright owners implicitly blessed all this. But the current owners, a private equity firm called Daybreak, want to end that independent creativity. They are using copyright claims to threaten modders who wanted to customize the EverQuest experience to suit a different playstyle, running their own servers where things worked the way they wanted. 

One project in particular is in Daybreak’s crosshairs: “The Hero’s Journey” (THJ). Daybreak claims THJ has infringed its copyrights in Everquest visuals and character, cutting into its bottom line.

Ordinarily, when a company wants to remedy some actual harm, its lawyers will start with a cease-and-desist letter and potentially pursue a settlement. But if the goal is intimidation, a rightsholder is free to go directly to federal court and file a complaint. That’s exactly what Daybreak did, using that shock-and-awe approach to cow not only The Hero’s Journey team, but unrelated modders as well.

Daybreak’s complaint seems to have dazzled the judge in the case by presenting side-by-side images of dragons and characters that look identical in the base game and when using the mod, without explaining that these images are the ones provided by EverQuest’s official client, which players have lawfully downloaded from the official source. The judge wound up short-cutting the copyright analysis and issuing a ruling that has proven devastating to the thousands of players who are part of EverQuest modding communities.

Daybreak and the developers of The Hero’s Journey are now in private arbitration, and Daybreak has wasted no time in sending that initial ruling to other modders. The order doesn’t bind anyone who’s unaffiliated with The Hero’s Journey, but it’s understandable that modders who are in it for fun and community would cave to the implied threat that they could be next.

As a result, dozens of fan servers have stopped operating. Daybreak has also persuaded the maintainers of the shared server emulation software that most fan servers rely upon, EQEmulator, to adopt terms of service that essentially ban any but the most negligible modding. The terms also provide that “your operation of an EQEmulator server is subject to Daybreak’s permission, which it may revoke for any reason or no reason at any time, without any liability to you or any other person or entity. You agree to fully and immediately comply with any demand from Daybreak to modify, restrict, or shut down any EQEmulator server.” 

This is sadly not even an uncommon story in fanspaces—from the dustup over changes to the Dungeons and Dragons open gaming license to the “guidelines” issued by CBS for Star Trek fan films, we see new generations of owners deciding to alienate their most avid fans in exchange for more control over their new property. It often seems counterintuitive—fans are creating new experiences, for free, that encourage others to get interested in the original work.

Daybreak can claim a shameful victory: it has imposed unilateral terms on the modding community that are far more restrictive than what fair use and other user rights would allow. In the process, it is alienating the very people it should want to cultivate as customers: hardcore Everquest fans. If it wants fans to continue to invest in making its games appeal to broader audiences and serve as testbeds for game development and sources of goodwill, it needs to give the game’s fans room to breathe and to play.

If you’ve been a target of Daybreak’s legal bullying, we’d love to hear from you; email us at info@eff.org.

Fair use is not just an excuse to copy—it’s a pillar of online speech protection, and disregarding it in order to lash out at a critic should have serious consequences. That’s what we told a federal court in Channel 781 News v. Waltham Community Access Corporation, our case fighting copyright abuse on behalf of citizen journalists.

Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), a public access cable station in Waltham, Massachusetts, records city council meetings on video. Channel 781 News (Channel 781), a group of volunteers who report on the city council, curates clips from those recordings for its YouTube channel, along with original programming, to spark debate on issues like housing and transportation. WCAC sent a series of takedown notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), accusing Channel 781 of copyright infringement. That led to YouTube deactivating Channel 781’s channel just days before a critical municipal election. Represented by EFF and the law firm Brown Rudnick LLP, Channel 781 sued WCAC for misrepresentations in its takedown notices under an important but underutilized provision of the DMCA.

The DMCA gives copyright holders a powerful tool to take down other people’s content from platforms like YouTube. The “notice and takedown” process requires only an email, or filling out a web form, in order to accuse another user of copyright infringement and have their content taken down. And multiple notices typically lead to the target’s account being suspended, because doing so helps the platform avoid liability. There’s no court or referee involved, so anyone can bring an accusation and get a nearly instantaneous takedown.

Of course, that power invites abuse. Because filing a DMCA infringement notice is so easy, there’s a temptation to use it at the drop of a hat to take down speech that someone doesn’t like. To prevent that, before sending a takedown notice, a copyright holder has to consider whether the use they’re complaining about is a fair use. Specifically, the copyright holder needs to form a “good faith belief” that the use is not “authorized by the law,” such as through fair use.

WCAC didn’t do that. They didn’t like Channel 781 posting short clips from city council meetings recorded by WCAC as a way of educating Waltham voters about their elected officials. So WCAC fired off DMCA takedown notices at many of Channel 781’s clips that were posted on YouTube.

WCAC claims they considered fair use, because a staff member watched a video about it and discussed it internally. But WCAC ignored three of the four fair use factors. WCAC ignored that their videos had no creativity, being nothing more than records of public meetings. They ignored that the clips were short, generally including one or two officials’ comments on a single issue. They ignored that the clips caused WCAC no monetary or other harm, beyond wounded pride. And they ignored facts they already knew, and that are central to the remaining fair use factor: by excerpting and posting the clips with new titles, Channel 781 was putting its own “spin” on the material - in other words, transforming it. All of these facts support fair use.

Instead, WCAC focused only on the fact that the clips they targeted were not altered further or put into a larger program. Looking at just that one aspect of fair use isn’t enough, and changing the fair use inquiry to reach the result they wanted is hardly the way to reach a “good faith belief.”

That’s why we’re asking the court to rule that WCAC’s conduct violated the law and that they should pay damages. Copyright holders need to use the powerful DMCA takedown process with care, and when they don’t, there needs to be consequences.

As the first copyright cases concerning AI reach appeals courts, EFF wants to protect important, beneficial uses of this technology—including AI for legal research. That’s why we weighed in on the long-running case of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. This case raises at least two important issues: the use of (possibly) copyrighted material to train a machine learning AI system, and public access to legal texts.  

ROSS Intelligence was a legal research startup that built an AI-based tool for locating judges’ written opinions based on natural language queries—a competitor to ubiquitous legal research platforms like Lexis and Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw. To build its tool, ROSS hired another firm to read through thousands of the “West headnotes” that Thomson Reuters adds to the legal decisions it publishes, paraphrasing the individual legal conclusions (what lawyers call “holdings”) that the headnotes identified. ROSS used those paraphrases to train its tool. Importantly, the ROSS tool didn’t output any West headnotes, or even the paraphrases of those headnotes—it simply directed the user to the original judges’ decisions. Still, Thomson sued ROSS for copyright infringement, arguing that using the headnotes without permission was illegal.  

Early decisions in the suit were encouraging. EFF wrote about how the court allowed ROSS to bring an antitrust counterclaim against Thomson Reuters, letting them try to prove that Thomson was abusing monopoly power. And the trial judge initially ruled that ROSS’s use of the West headnotes was fair use under copyright law. 

The case then took turns for the worse. ROSS was unable to prove its antitrust claim. The trial judge issued a new opinion reversing his earlier decision and finding that ROSS’s use was not fair but rather infringed Thomson’s copyrights. And in the meantime, ROSS had gone out of business (though it continues to defend itself in court).  

The court’s new decision on copyright was particularly worrisome. It ruled that West headnotes—a few lines of text copying or summarizing a single legal conclusion from a judge’s written opinion—could be copyrighted, and that using them to train the ROSS tool was not fair use, in part because ROSS was a competitor to Thomson Reuters. And the court rejected ROSS’s attempt to avoid any illegal copying by using a “clean room” procedure often used in software development. The decision also threatens to limit the public’s access to legal texts. 

EFF weighed in with an amicus brief joined by the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive, Public Knowledge, and Public.Resource.Org. We argued that West headnotes are not copyrightable in the first place, since they simply restate individual points from judges’ opinions with no meaningful creative contributions. And even if copyright does attach to the headnotes, we argued, the source material is entirely factual statements about what the law is, and West’s contribution was minimal, so fair use should have tipped in ROSS’s favor. The trial judge had found that the factual nature of the headnotes favored ROSS, but dismissed this factor as unimportant, effectively writing it out of the law. 

This case is one of the first to touch on copyright and AI, and is likely to influence many of the other cases that are already pending (with more being filed all the time). That’s why we’re trying to help the appeals court get this one right. The law should encourage the creation of AI tools to digest and identify facts for use by researchers, including facts about the law. 

Jimmy Kimmel has been in the news a lot recently, which means the ongoing lawsuit against him by perennial late-night punching bag/convicted fraudster/former congressman George Santos flew under the radar. But what happened in that case is an essential illustration of the limits of both copyright law and the “fine print” terms of service on websites and apps. 

What happened was this: Kimmel and his staff saw that Santos was on Cameo, which allows people to purchase short videos from various public figures with requested language. Usually it’s something like “happy birthday” or “happy retirement.” In the case of Kimmel and his writers, they set out to see if there was anything they couldn’t get Santos to say on Cameo. For this to work, they obviously didn’t disclose that it was Jimmy Kimmel Live! asking for the videos.  

Santos did not like the segment, which aired clips of these videos, called “Will Santos Say It?”.  He sued Kimmel, ABC, and ABC’s parent company, Disney. He alleged both copyright infringement and breach of contract—the contract in this case being Cameo’s terms of service. He lost on all counts, twice: his case was dismissed at the district court level, and then that dismissal was upheld by an appeals court. 

On the copyright claim, Kimmel and Disney argued and won on the grounds of fair use. The court cited precedent that fair use excuses what might be strictly seen as infringement if such a finding would “stifle the very creativity” that copyright is meant to promote. In this case, the use of the videos was part of the ongoing commentary by Jimmy Kimmel Live! around whether there was anything Santos wouldn’t say for money. Santos tried to argue that since this was their purpose from the outset, the use wasn’t transformative. Which... isn’t how it works. Santos’ purpose was, presumably, to fulfill a request sent through the app. The show’s purpose was to collect enough examples of a behavior to show a pattern and comment on it.  

Santos tried to say that their not disclosing what the reason was invalidated the fair use argument because it was “deceptive.” But the court found that the record didn’t show that the deception was designed to replace the market for Santos’s Cameos. It bears repeating: commenting on the quality of a product or the person making it is not legally actionable interference with a business. If someone tells you that a movie, book, or, yes, Cameo isn’t worth anything because of its ubiquity or quality and shows you examples, that’s not a deceptive business practice. In fact, undercover quality checks and reviews are fairly standard practices! Is this a funnier and more entertaining example than a restaurant review? Yes. That doesn’t make it unprotected by fair use.  

It’s nice to have this case as a reminder that, despite everything, the major studios often argue, fair use protects everyone, including them. Don’t hold your breath on them remembering this the next time someone tries to make a YouTube review of a Hollywood movie using clips.  

Another claim from this case that is less obvious but just as important involves the Cameo terms of service. We often see contracts being used to restrict people’s fair use rights. Cameo offers different kinds of videos for purchase. The most well-known comes with a personal use license, the “happy birthdays,” and so on. They also offer a “commercial” use license, presumably if you want to use the videos to generate revenue, like you do with an ad or paid endorsement. However, in this case, the court found that the terms of service are a contract between a customer and Cameo, not between the customer and the video maker. Cameo’s terms of service explicitly lay out when their terms apply to the person selling a video, and they don’t create a situation where Santos can use those terms to sue Jimmy Kimmel Live! According to the court, the terms don’t even imply a shared understanding and contract between the two parties.  

It's so rare to find a situation where the wall of text that most terms of service consist of actually helps protect free expression; it’s a pleasant surprise to see it here.  

In general, we at EFF hate it when these kinds of contracts—you know the ones, where you hit accept after scrolling for ages just so you can use the app—are used to constrain users’ rights. Fair use is supposed to protect us all from overly strict interpretations of copyright law, but abusive terms of service can erode those rights. We’ll keep fighting for those rights and the people who use them, even if the one exercising fair use is Disney.