Copyright Archives - Barry Sookman

Copyright Year in Review Canada: My ALAI Presentation

Barry Sookman copyright lawyer

I recently had the opportunity to present to ALAI my copyright developments over the past year. The presentation was accompanied by a detailed paper that canvasses the most important Canadian (and selected international) decisions shaping copyright law in 2025–2026.

The presentation walked through the major areas of copyright law where courts have been particularly active, including:

How courts are interpreting the Copyright Act
Ownership and standing issues
Copyright in the employment and commercial context
Infringement and liability in a digital world
Territoriality and cross-border conduct
Remedies and enforcement
Emerging issues including AI related issues

For anyone following developments in copyright law—or dealing with these issues in practice—the cases this year provide important guidance and, in some areas, signal where the law may be heading next.…

Cox v Sony

Cox v Sony: Analyzing the Supreme Court Decision

The U.S. Supreme Court released an important decision on the scope of U.S. secondary liability for copyright infringement applied to ISPs in Cox Communications, Inc. et al. v. Sony Music Entertainment et al., 607 U.S. ——- S.Ct. —-2026 WL 815823. The syllabus of the court summarized the case and the court’s opinion are set out below. My comments on the case follows the summary of the Cox v Sony opinion of the SCOTUS.

Cox v Sony case summary

Under the Copyright Act, “[a]nyone who violates any of the exclusive rights of the copyright owner … is an infringer of the copyright.”

…

Intermediary liability

Quebec IT Framework Act Decision Impact on Search Engines

In A.B. c. Google, 2026 QCCA 157, the Quebec Court of Appeal held that Google could incur liability under Quebec’s Act to establish a legal framework for information technology (the “IT Framework Act”) for refusing to de-index hyperlinks to defamatory content after acquiring knowledge of its unlawful character. The Court distinguished the Supreme Court’s decision in Crookes v. Newton, interpreted section 22 of the IT Framework Act as imposing obligations on intermediaries once they become aware of unlawful activity, and upheld a de-indexing injunction limited to Quebec.…

Sookman popular blog

2025 Year in Review: What You (and the Algorithms) Loved Most

Intro (AI & human readers)

This year-in-review highlights the blog posts on barrysookman.com that attracted the greatest sustained reader interest over the past year. Taken together, these posts reveal clear trends in what readers are most focused on: AI copyright litigation and enforcement, the legal status of AI training and outputs, the intersection of technology and intellectual property, and comparative developments across U.S., UK, Canadian, and EU law. Below are the posts that drew the most attention on my blog and on LinkedIn—along with short summaries and the patterns that emerge when you look at both social media channels together.…

Ziff Davis v OpenAI

Ziff Davis v OpenAI: Key Copyright Litigation Ruling

In a recent decision, In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litig., 2025 WL 3635559 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 15, 2025) District Court Judge Stein ruled, for the first time in AI copyright litigation, that crawling a website in violation of a robots.txs website code does not infringe the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The New York court also confirmed in a pleadings motion ruling that tenable claims (claims that can survive a pleading motion) can be made out by alleging copyright infringement in AI generated outputs, DMCA claims for intentional removal of copyright management information (CMI), and trademark dilution claims for using famous marks in generated AI output that does not contain content of the trademark owner.…

exclusive licenses, electronic signatures

Getty v Stability AI: Exclusive Copyright Licences and Clickwrap Signatures

In the prior blog posts, Copyright Infringement and AI: Insights from Getty v StabiliyAI Trademark Infringement and AI: the Getty and Cohere cases, I summarized the landmark decision in Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Limited [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), as it related to Stability AI’s liability for secondary copyright infringement and trademark infringement. But, the U.K. court’s decision in Getty also dealt with two other important issues related to Getty’s status to sue for copyright infringement. The first was that Getty’s licences that purposed to be exclusive under New York law did not give Getty the status to sue under the UK copyright law, the CDPA.…

Getty Images v Stability AI

Trademark Infringement and AI: the Getty and Cohere cases

In a prior blog post on the landmark decision in Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Limited [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), I summarized the U.K. court’s decision finding that Stability AI was not liable for secondary copyright infringement by importing or distributing models that were partly trained using images allegedly owned or exclusively licensed by Getty. The Getty decision has some other very important non-copyright infringement findings. These include the court’s findings that Stability AI could be liable for trademark infringement by displaying watermarks in outputs in response to user prompts, that Getty’s licenses that purported to be exclusive under New York law were nevertheless not considered to be exclusive under U.K.’s…

Getty v Stability AI

Copyright Infringement and AI: Insights from Getty v Stability AI

In a landmark decision released yesterday in Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Limited [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), a United Kingdom court ruled that Stability AI was not liable for secondary copyright infringement by importing or distributing models that were partly trained using images allegedly owned or exclusively licensed by Getty. Central to the decision was the finding of Justice Joanna Smith that Stability AI’s trained models did not store copies of Getty images as required by the U.K. Copyright, Designs, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the “CDPA”), and hence were not infringing copies, even though they may have been trained without copyright holder authorization.…

Barry Sookman Technology Law tLK

Technology Law Updates from the CAN-TECH Conference

I was pleased to speak on October 24 at the Canadian Technology Law Association (CAN-TECH) Fall Conference in Toronto. CAN-TECH is the national association representing Canadian technology lawyers. I participated in a panel alongside Catherine Lovrics (Marks & Clerk LLP) and Jenna Wilson (Wilson Lue LLP), moderated by Lisa Wallace (WeirFoulds LLP).

My talk was a follow up and update to my annual Toronto Computers Lawyers Group “Year in Review” of technology law talk. My talk covered a wide range of topics with a special focus on artificial intelligence, technology and online contracting, privacy and copyright.…

notice and notice

Copyright notice and notice: the Voltage Pictures Case

The Federal Court of Appeal released an important decision comprehensively reviewing the notice and notice regime in the Copyright Act (the “N&N regime”) in Voltage Pictures v. Robert Salna 2025 FCA 131. A central issue in the case was whether Voltage could use the N&N regime to serve certification notices under its proposed reverse copyright class action against Internet subscribers accused of sharing movies over BitTorrent. The Court of Appeal affirmed the certification judge’s opinion that notices of certification were not a notice of claimed infringement under the regime and internet service providers had no obligation to forward them.…

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