When it comes to trademark and copyright infringement, It’s been more human initiated and controlled. However, the rapid expansion of AI is changing the global perspective, and AI involvement in trademark and copyright infringement in almost every area of business and commerce.
Recent news announces a major lawsuit by Encyclopedia Britannica accusing OpenAI of massive trademark and copyright infringement. Here’s a short description of the lawsuit’s accusations: “OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit. This time, Encyclopedia Britannica took legal action against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright and trademark infringements, as first reported by Reuters. More specifically, Britannica alleged that OpenAI illegally used its “copyrighted content at a massive scale” when training its AI models. Not just with training, the encyclopedia company claimed that ChatGPT’s responses to user queries sometimes contain “full or partial verbatim reproductions of [Britannica’s] copyright articles.” [Read entire article here.]
To illustrate just how widespread the problem is, the article Copyright Law in 2025: Courts begin to draw lines around AI training, piracy, and market harm describes multiple major lawsuits initiated in 2025. “March 16, 2026 – In 2025, U.S. courts issued the first substantive, merits-stage decisions addressing whether the use of copyrighted works to train generative artificial intelligence systems constitutes “fair use.” Although these rulings do not settle all open questions — and in some respects highlight emerging judicial disagreements — they represent a significant inflection point in copyright law’s response to large language models, image generators, and other foundation models.” Example lawsuits:
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Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal.) – Fair use for lawfully acquired training data — with a hard stop on piracy
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Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc. (N.D. Cal.) – Divergence on market harm, convergence on piracy risk
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Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd. (N.D. Cal.) – Training is not the same as output
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Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc. (N.D. Cal.) – Pleading standards matter in AI copyright cases
There are more, so check out the article.
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Last Updated on March 20, 2026 by Jim Kimmons