The Legal Landscape Has Shifted… Sort Of

The legal situation in 2025 looks quite different than it did in 2023, yet somehow equally uncertain:

  • Stability AI largely wins UK court battle against Getty Images
  • Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit ($1.5 billion)
  • Australia rejects AI data mining to protect creatives
  • UK launches consultation on copyright and AI opt-out system
  • US Copyright Office issues key guidance on fair use in generative AI training

We now have actual court verdicts (though they're contradictory), government policies (pulling in opposite directions), and settlements totalling billions of dollars. And yet, the fundamental questions remain unresolved.

What's Changed?

The main shift is that what were once hypothetical legal arguments have become real court cases with real consequences.

Getty Images' lawsuit against Stability AI concluded in November 2025 with a split decision. The judge ruled that the AI "doesn't store or reproduce" copyrighted works, dismissing the copyright claims while finding limited trademark infringement. This is directly opposed to the emerging consensus that image generation models can indeed store the materials they are trained on.

Meanwhile, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion in September 2025 to settle a lawsuit with authors. A judge ruled that training AI on legally purchased books was fair use, but using millions of pirated books from "shadow libraries" was not. This suggests that how you acquire training data may matter more than whether you use copyrighted material at all.

Different jurisdictions are taking radically different approaches. Australia rejected a proposed text and data mining exception. The UK launched a consultation proposing an "opt-out" system. In the US, more than 50 copyright lawsuits are currently pending against AI companies.

The Creator's Dilemma

Under current US law, you generally can't copyright AI-generated content, but others may potentially use your copyrighted works to train their models.

The Copyright Office's January 2025 report confirmed that AI outputs qualify for copyright only where there's sufficient human authorship. Simply providing prompts to generate content is not enough.

This creates an impossible situation for many creators: if they opt out of having their work used for AI training, they protect their past work but may be disadvantaged as the technology advances. If they don't opt out, their style and techniques become free training data for systems that could replace them. And anything they create using AI tools may not even be copyrightable.

Beyond Images: Music, Text, and Cultural Sovereignty

While visual art dominated the conversation in 2023, by 2025 every creative field has found itself in crisis.

In music, AI can now replicate artist voices with stunning accuracy. While major music production companies like Universal have been suing AI generators, they have now begun to partner with them and make acquisitions.

In writing, authors are watching AI systems trained on their books produce content that competes directly with them. The New York Times is still involved in suing OpenAI and Microsoft.

Indigenous communities have raised alarm about cultural appropriation through AI. In Australia, a 2025 APRA AMCOS survey found that 89% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander music creators believe AI has the potential to cause cultural appropriation, and 67% agree it makes protecting cultural rights harder.

Case Study: Getty Images v. Stability AI

In January 2023, Getty Images filed one of the first major copyright lawsuits against an AI company, accusing Stability AI of scraping 12 million copyrighted images. The verdict came in November 2025.

Getty actually dropped its primary copyright claims during trial. The judge ruled that Stable Diffusion "does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works," though contrary to growing scientific consensus. Getty won a narrow trademark claim. On copyright — the core issue — they lost.

The case reveals that where AI training physically occurs matters enormously; legal frameworks designed for physical piracy don't map cleanly onto AI systems; and proving copyright infringement in AI training may be nearly impossible without aggressive transparency laws.

We've had our major test case. We still don't know if training AI on copyrighted works is legal.

Teaching AI Ethics

  • Legal Studies: Compare how Australia, the UK, and the EU are handling AI and copyright differently.
  • English and Literature: How does AI challenge the Romantic notion of the solitary creative genius?
  • Computer Science: How might you design an AI training system that respects copyright?
  • Philosophy: Explore the concept of "the creator's dilemma" — what ethical frameworks help balance individual rights against collective benefits?
  • Business and Economics: Analyse the correlation between copyright restrictiveness and AI innovation.
  • Media Studies: Investigate how Perplexity AI both trains on and actively fetches copyrighted news content.
  • Visual Arts: How would you respond to current legal uncertainty as an artist?
  • Music: How do we value music in an age when AI can generate unlimited songs?
  • Social Studies: What obligations do AI developers have to Indigenous communities?