In Depth: Global Copyright Fight Heats Up Over AI Content Boom

In 2025, the rapid proliferation of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) models led to a surge of digital content and provoked escalating legal and regulatory conflicts, especially surrounding copyright protection. As AI-generated media flooded online platforms, creators and media companies sought to defend their intellectual property rights, instigating an unprecedented wave of lawsuits and initiating high-profile negotiations with technology firms. The rise of AI content generation is forcing courts, regulators, and businesses to reevaluate established assumptions about creativity, ownership, and the economic value of human labor in the digital era[para. 1][para. 3].

A notable lawsuit was filed on December 22, 2025, by Pulitzer-winning author John Carreyrou and fellow writers against six AI giants — OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity AI — for allegedly using copyrighted works without authorization to train their models. Such legal challenges echo earlier efforts by major U.S. record labels and Hollywood studios targeting large-scale copyright infringement associated with AI training and outputs[para. 2].

Globally, the nature of the conflict varies. The U.S. and Europe focus mainly on whether AI companies have unlawfully exploited protected works and whether AI-generated content competes with or replaces human-created outputs. In contrast, China’s dominant concern lies in content governance: managing, labeling, and tracing AI-generated material on social, commercial, and news platforms, where the distinction between real and synthetic is often obscured[para. 4][para. 5].

Media conglomerates and creative industries are adopting a dual approach: pursuing both litigation and licensing. While legal actions challenge unauthorized use in AI training, strategic partnerships and licensing deals attempt to manage and profit from AI-generated content. For instance, on December 11, 2025, Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI, securing equity and a license for its video generation tool Sora, allowing users to generate content featuring over 200 Disney characters. Disney’s CEO Bob Iger highlighted the company's embrace of technological change and industry disruption[para. 7][para. 8][para. 9]. Still, Disney continued to accuse Google and other firms of massive-scale copyright infringement, exemplifying the sector's multifaceted strategy[para. 11].

The music industry mirrors this approach. Universal Music Group (UMG) settled a lawsuit with AI music platform Udio by entering into a partnership, following similar accusations of copyright misuse by Udio and rival Suno. Market research suggested consumers prefer human artists, indicating AI tools may supplement rather than replace human creativity. Suno went on to raise $250 million in investment, reaching a $2.4 billion valuation, demonstrating strong investor confidence in AI music startups despite ongoing legal controversies[para. 15][para. 16][para. 17].

The legal status of the data used to train AI remains unresolved. Lawsuits allege that companies like Midjourney and MiniMax used web scraping to acquire copyrighted materials. In its IPO prospectus, MiniMax acknowledged potential copyright violations could lead to penalties exceeding twice its 2024 revenue, and revealed some training data may lack proper authorization. Legal frameworks are evolving globally: the EU is investigating Google’s training practices, Japan enforces strict “opt-in” copyright rules, and China distinguishes between lenient approaches to training data and strict outputs[para. 23][para. 24][para. 25][para. 26][para. 27].

China faces additional problems with an explosion of low-quality, misleading, or false AI-generated content ("slop") across social media. Legal and technical challenges around content tracing persist despite watermarking regulations. Notable incidents, such as the use of obviously synthetic video in a state television documentary, underscore these challenges. Platforms like Zhihu have developed AI detection tools, achieving over 90% accuracy in distinguishing synthetic from human content[para. 29][para. 30][para. 31][para. 32].

A core unresolved question is the copyrightability and ownership of AI-generated content. Chinese courts have issued conflicting decisions: some accept human-guided AI works as copyrightable due to creative input, while others dismiss them for lack of originality and human control. The U.S. Copyright Office, as of January 2025, ruled that fully AI-generated works are not copyrightable unless modified by humans. This ambiguity over the legal status of AI-generated content is seen as one of the most pressing issues confronting copyright law in the age of artificial intelligence[para. 34][para. 35][para. 36][para. 37][para. 38][para. 39].