USA – CALIFORNIA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Rey Barceló, Barceló, Harrison & Walker, LLP
Key California 2025 Copyright and Trade Mark Cases at a Glance • Bartz v Anthropic (N.D. Cal., June 2025) – training held fair use on the record presented, but the court treated piracy and “central library” retention as a separate problem that could still create liability. • Kadrey v Meta (N.D. Cal., June 2025) – Meta won summary judgment on fair use, but the court’s reasoning emphasised market substitution and warned that the next cases will turn on whether plaintiffs develop meaningful evidence of market harm and market dilution. • Concord Music Group v Anthropic (N.D. Cal., March 2025) – court declined a broad preliminary injunction against alleged lyric use, highlighting overbreadth of the requested relief and insufficient proof of irreparable harm. • Lyon v Adobe (N.D. Cal., filed 16 December 2025) – proposed class action against Adobe alleging unlawful book copying for training SlimLM mod - els, illustrating the next wave of data supply chain allegations. • Yuga Labs v Ripps (9th Cir., July 2025) – the Ninth Circuit held non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can qualify as goods under the Lanham Act, but required a traditional confusion analysis. • Cameo v OpenAI (N.D. Cal., November 2025) – Temporary Restraining Order disallowing OpenAI’s use of “Cameo” branding for a feature, highlighting naming collisions and reverse-confusion risk. • Williams-Sonoma v Quince (N.D. Cal., November 2025) – false advertising and unfair competition claims targeting “dupe” marketing and implied equivalence. Copyright in California in 2025 – Emerging Themes in AI Training Cases The leading decisions tend to converge on one point: AI training can be characterised as transformative in purpose. The divergence is not whether AI can be transformative, but whether the defendant’s data acquisition and retention practices can be justified and whether the plaintiff can prove meaningful market harm. For clients, these disputes are increasingly less about slogans (“training is fair use” versus “training is theft”) and more about facts: provenance, reten - tion, proof of market harm and the scope of requested relief.
California sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI, a dense concentration of creative industries, and platform-driven electronic commerce. In 2025, those forces produced a noticeable shift in copyright and trade mark law: courts began moving from early pro - cedural disputes to substantive decisions that now shape product design, contracting and compliance choices. In the copyright arena, many of the disputes in 2025 concerning generative AI training focused less on whether a model can occasionally regurgitate protect - ed content and more on whether the training process involved unlawful copying at scale. The legal analysis, in turn, tends to centre on fair use, data provenance and market harm. Fundamentally, copyright generally protects expres - sion, not ideas or facts: novels, screenplays, and song lyrics sit at the core of what copyright protects. That baseline matters because it frames why AI ingestion or training disputes are not simply about abstract learning but about copying protected expression, and raise questions about copying protected expression at scale and whether permission or fair use applies. In 2025, California was also on the leading edge of novel trade mark disputes involving digital-native products, creator branding and platform-scale nam - ing collisions. These cases did not replace traditional infringement and counterfeiting disputes, but they lay - ered in new fact patterns where confusion and repu - tation harm can travel faster than litigation timelines. For clients, the practical issue is risk management in naming, advertising claims and the internal enforce - ment mechanisms of major platforms. Trade mark law protects brand identifiers that sig - nal source, sponsorship or affiliation. In digital com - merce, those identifiers can be words, logos or even the presentation of an online product experience. The year’s cases from California show that courts con - tinue to apply traditional confusion analysis, but they are increasingly asked to do so in contexts where the product is virtual or the marketing is platform-native, especially where “dupe” or comparison marketing implies equivalence.
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