June’s Legal Landscape: Movement in Generative AI “Fair Use” Doctrine, ChatGPT Integration and the GDPR, and a Sea Change in Platform Liability from Brazil’s Highest Court
This roundup gathers and briefly analyzes tech-related cases across a variety of legal issues. The Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP) tracks these and other tech-related cases in the US, federal, state, and international courts in this regularly updated litigation tracker.
If you would like to learn more about new cases and developments directly from the people involved, TJLP hosts a regular tech litigation webinar series! Past sessions have explored the ongoing lawsuit against Clearview AI, a notorious facial recognition company, NetChoice’s constitutional challenges to California’s kids’ online safety laws, and various lawsuits and proposed legislation targeting surveillance pricing and wage systems. In July, we will host a webinar on reproductive data justice, focusing on Washington’s My Health My Data Act and potential cases that could be brought under it (and similar laws). If you are interested in learning more, please complete this RSVP form.
This month’s Roundup highlights the following cases:
Disney Enterprises, Inc. v. Midjourney, Inc. (C.D. Cal. Case No. 2:25-cv-05275) – On June 11, Disney and Universal Studios (including Marvel, Lucas Film, Twentieth Century Fox, and DreamWorks) sued the creators of Midjourney, a text-to-image generative AI product, claiming they infringed on the companies’ copyright-protected content to train their models.
Meta v. Joy Timeline HK (filed in Hong Kong) – On June 12, Meta sued the parent company behind Crush AI, an “AI nudifier” app that allows users to upload photos of people and create nonconsensual intimate imagery of them, for repeatedly running thousands of ads for the app across Meta platforms despite Meta’s attempts to remove them.
Media Matters v. Federal Trade Commission (D.D.C. Case No. 1:25-cv-01959) – On June 23, nonprofit research center Media Matters sued the FTC, claiming the Agency was facilitating an “ongoing campaign of retribution” seeking to further punish Media Matters for research connecting ads on Elon Musk’s X to neo-Nazi and white supremacist content.
Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal. Case No. 3:24-cv-05417-WHA) – On June 23, a federal judge ruled that Anthropic’s buying and digitizing certain books to train its large language models (LLMs) constitutes fair use, an exception to copyright infringement liability, but that fair use does not protect pirated books that Anthropic used to train their models.
Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (N.D. Cal. Case No. 3:23-cv-03417) – On June 25, a federal judge ruled that Meta’s similar use of the plaintiffs’ creative works, including pirated copies of their books, to train its LLMs constitutes fair use, as plaintiff-artists failed to show that Meta’s conduct harmed the market for books and related content generally.
Getty Images et al. v. Stability AI (High Court of Justice Business and Property Courts of England and Wales Case No. IL-2023-000007) – On June 25, Getty Images—which maintains one of the largest and most comprehensive photo archives—droppedits primary copyright infringement claims against Stability for using Getty’s images to train Stable Diffusion and produce similar outputs, since Stability did the model training outside of the UK and Getty lacked strong proof of how Stability acquired this data.
NOYB – European Center for Digital Rights v. Bumble Holding Limited et al. (Austrian Data Protection Authority Case No. C-099) – On June 26, NOYB (“None of Your Business”) filed a complaint claiming that dating platform Bumble violated the GDPR, EU’s data protection law, when it integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT product to fuel the so-called AI Icebreakers feature to “Bumble for Friends” without first receiving adequate consent from users and without having a legitimate interest in sharing their data with Open AI.
Marco Civil da Internet. On June 26, Brazil’s Supreme Court issued a significant ruling (in Portuguese) that declared Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet (MCI) unconstitutional, allowing individuals to sue social media companies when, after a victim seeks content removal, companies continue hosting illegal content, effectively ordering companies like Google, Meta, and TikTok to actively monitor content that involves hate speech, racism, and incitements to violence, among other categories of unlawful content.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton. On June 27, the US Supreme Court held that a Texas law requiring commercial websites to verify visitors’ ages before showing them obscene content did not violate the First Amendment. The Court applied intermediate scrutiny review, rejecting the more stringent strict scrutiny review as it would “call into question all age-verification requirements,” including in-person examples like checking a person’s ID before allowing them to purchase alcohol, firearms, and pornography.
Utah v. Snap, Inc. (Third Judicial District Court, Salt Lake County) – On June 30, the Utah Division of Consumer Protection and Attorney General sued Snap over Snapchat’s use of deceptive design features that allegedly addict children to the platform, including the rollout of Snap’s “My AI” chatterbot product to users of all ages that integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Continue reading June’s Roundup on Tech Policy Press.