Law | The Verge

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell are suing Anthropic

2026-08-31T07:50:37-04:00

Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell have filed suit against Anthropic in the US District Court for the Northern District of California seeking damages for "tens of thousands" copyrighted works. The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount.

This is just the latest high-profile suit against Anthropic, which recently settled a suit brought by the publishing industry for $1.5 billion. It's also faced multiple la …

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Amazon is trying to crush class action suits before they get started

2026-08-17T05:39:17-04:00

On Friday, Amazon customers received an email alerting them to an update to the site's terms and conditions. Most notably, it stated that disputes would now be resolved through arbitration and said users agree to a class action waiver.

Amazon framed this as a "fast and efficient" way to resolve issues, but it notably would prevent customers from seeking the involvement of a judge or jury in most circumstances. Customers can still take Amazon to small claims court in certain circumstances, though payouts are often limited to a few thousand dollars.

The relevant sections of Amazon's legal policies page now read:

YOU AND WE AGREE THAT ANY …

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Buc-ee’s dodges John Oliver to sue another small business

2026-08-10T07:07:50-04:00

Buc-ee’s mega-convenience store and 120-pump gas station in Mount Crawford, Virginia. | Image: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Buc-ee's became something of a viral sensation during the World Cup, but it has a troubling history of suing small gas stations and convenience stores. On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver literally begged the company to sue him for selling merch featuring his squirrel mascot, Mr. Nutterbutter, with branding that reads "Buc-Off." But Buc-ee's has so far declined to take the bait, instead targeting yet another small business that lacks the deep pockets and legal team of HBO.

According to WDTN, an NBC affiliate in Miami Valley, Ohio, Buc-ee's opened its first locations in the state earlier this year. And now it's targeting es …

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Meta ordered to pay an additional $567 million in public nuisance ruling

2026-08-07T05:10:01-04:00

Meta has been ordered to pay $567 million in the second phase of New Mexico's landmark child safety case, bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion for being a "public nuisance." In a ruling published on Thursday, the Santa Fe district court found that Meta's platforms are a "significant contributing cause" of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and safety throughout New Mexico.

"This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," New Mexico Attorney G …

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OpenAI says Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit is ‘rotten to its core’

2026-08-06T05:33:11-04:00

OpenAI has asked a federal judge to toss out Apple's landmark lawsuit accusing the ChatGPT maker of stealing trade secrets, describing the allegations as "meritless." In a motion filed yesterday to dismiss the complaint, OpenAI says that Apple is mischaracterizing both the actions of the AI startup's employees as theft, and "generic" product development information as "trade secrets," adding that Apple made no reasonable efforts to maintain such secrecy.

The dismissal request is in response to a lawsuit filed by Apple in July, alleging that former Apple employees that went on to work for OpenAI stole confidential documents to further OpenAI …

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OpenAI drags Apple’s lawsuit into the court of public opinion

2026-08-04T08:07:51-04:00

OpenAI says Apple’s lawsuit is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal.” | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

Apple's legal battle against OpenAI just got messier now that the ChatGPT-maker has publicly aired receipts to counter Apple's version of events. In a blog post published overnight titled "Apple is getting this wrong," OpenAI said that Apple's lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is "careless, aggressive, and oddly personal," sharing iMessage and email exchanges to challenge allegations central to the case.

This isn't a legal response from OpenAI, but it's an attempt to sway the court of public opinion by poking contradictions into Apple's case using cherry-picked communications.

The lawsuit filed by Apple last month primarily rev …

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Artists are lawyering up against AI slop, and some are even winning

2026-07-28T16:19:25-04:00

Artists whose work has been co-opted by AI are taking to court. | Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he spent "five to six years researching, writing, and investigating" - had been pirated and fed to a chatbot. He says he felt a "cocktail" of emotions: "anger over the brazenness of the theft, worry over what this means for writers, and a healthy thirst for revenge on these massive corporations that have become galactically wealthy" using his …

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eBay’s bizarre cyberstalking saga ends with a $56 million settlement

2026-07-29T05:22:42-04:00

eBay and three former executives will pay $55.7 million as part of a settlement with a Massachusetts couple targeted with a bizarre harassment and cyberstalking campaign in 2019, as reported earlier by CNBC. The settlement will resolve a lengthy legal saga that revealed how eBay's former executives sent live insects, a bloody pig mask, a funeral wreath, and other strange items to David and Ina Steiner over their newsletter's coverage of eBay.

The Steiners, who operate the EcommerceBytes newsletter, sued eBay and its former executives - including ex-CEO Devin Wenig - in 2021. The lawsuit accused the company and its executives of launching a …

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The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border

2026-07-27T05:16:35-04:00

The government is prosecuting US citizen Sam Tunick for allegedly providing authorities with a "duress password" that wiped his phone when they tried to seize it at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport on January 24th, 2025. Federal agents detained Tunick at the airport, allegedly questioning him about child exploitation images. However, a motion filed by Tunick's lawyers argues this was simply "a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr Tunick's connections" to the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta.

The government is turning to a little-known and rarely used statute that makes it illegal to destroy or damage property to stop authorities fr …

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Whack-a-drone

2026-07-27T09:47:57-04:00

In Pasadena, California, there's a cute red brick courtyard where one storefront isn't like the rest. The glass doors open onto a sparse industrial hallway, which leads to a sunlit foyer with a large spiral staircase. Go up, and you'll see a typical coworking space: open tables, healthy snacks, a collection of meeting rooms with glass walls. Follow one hallway most of the way back, and you'll find Office 18.

There are no signs of life in this tiny private office that's supposed to be the headquarters of Odyssey Robot, an upstart US drone company. We saw three small desks and chairs, but no power strips, no monitors, no keyboards or chargers …

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