Copyright disputes in 2026: five cases that explain who owns music, design and data

Copyright disputes are rarely just about one song, one guitar or one website. They are about who gets to decide how a piece of culture travels. The five cases below, all reported in the past two years, show the same argument repeating in different industries.

Fender and the shape of a guitar

In June 2026, Thomann, the world's largest music retailer, said it was suing Fender over the company's wave of cease-and-desist letters about the Stratocaster body shape. The German retailer's own in-house brand, Harley Benton, had received one of those letters, according to Guitar World. Thomann says it is acting for other brands too. It names Tyler, Tom Anderson, Suhr, LsL, Maybach, Pensa, FGN and PRS as companies it believes are now at risk.

The legal argument is that the Stratocaster is not a copyrightable work of art, as the Dusseldorf regional court has ruled, and that its success comes from ergonomics rather than protected design. Fender's letters followed a default ruling at that court in March 2026, which granted "enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape" in the EU, Guitar World reported.

"We urge Fender to stop issuing cease and desist demands against manufacturers, distributors and dealers and to return to a fair, cooperative partnership," the Thomann statement reads.

A skater, the Minions and a last-minute reprieve

At the Milano Cortina Winter Games in February 2026, Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté learned that the Minions music he had used all season would not be cleared for Olympic ice. The Guardian reported that he had submitted the music through the International Skating Union's recommended rights-clearance process months earlier and had competed with it without issue, including at that season's European championships in Sheffield.

Universal then changed its mind. "Huge THANK YOU to everyone who reposted, shared and supported. Because of you Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights for this one special occasion," Guarino Sabaté wrote on Instagram, according to the Guardian.

The near-miss is not unusual in skating. The ISU director-general, Colin Smith, told the Guardian the problem is structural: "the music industry has no common clearance platform." The Canadian ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac lost two Prince songs from their Olympic rhythm dance. The Canadian pairs skaters Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps dropped a Phil Collins cover after being quoted a fee in the tens of thousands of dollars. At the Beijing Olympics in 2022, American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier were sued over a cover of House of the Rising Sun; the case settled privately for a sum the Guardian understands to be around $1.4m.

YouTube, SESAC and a weekend of silence

On Saturday 28 September 2024, some of the most-watched music on YouTube and YouTube Music vanished for US users, replaced by a message saying the video contained content from SESAC and was not available in their country. Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Green Day, Kanye West and Burna Boy were among the artists affected, The Verge reported.

SESAC, the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, has existed since 1930 and licenses the public performance of more than 1.5 million songs for its 15,000-plus affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers, according to its website. It is smaller than BMI and ASCAP, and was acquired by the private equity firm Blackstone in 2017.

YouTube spokesperson Mariana de Felice told The Verge: "We have held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration." By Monday afternoon the company said a new deal was in place and the music would return "over the next day or two." Variety, citing an unnamed source, suggested the takedown may have been a negotiating tactic because the previous deal did not expire until the following week.

Anne Frank, geo-blocking and the CJEU

The Anne Frank Stichting, which publishes a scholarly edition of the manuscripts, blocks Dutch visitors from reading them online because the Swiss Anne Frank Fonds holds copyrights that run until 2037 in the Netherlands. The Fonds argued in Dutch courts that geo-blocking is not enough, because people can bypass it with a VPN, and that the manuscripts therefore should not be published online at all, TorrentFreak reported in September 2024.

The lower court and the appeal court both sided with the defendants. The case is now before the Dutch Supreme Court, which has referred three questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union: whether a publication must be "directed" at a country to count as communication to the public; whether state-of-the-art geo-blocking is enough when VPNs exist; and, if it is not, whether the publisher is automatically liable.

CanLII and the AI scraper

The Canadian Legal Information Institute sued Vancouver startup Caseway AI in the British Columbia Supreme Court in November 2024, alleging Caseway built its business on a bulk download of CanLII's database without permission or compensation. In March 2026 the two announced a settlement. Terms are confidential.

"Each will move forward independently, and both consider the matter fully and finally resolved," a CanLII blog post said. Caseway called the outcome "a clear shift away from attempting to slow technological progress through litigation." It is one of several such fights: Canadian news publishers have sued OpenAI, and Cohere faces a separate lawsuit from another group of publishers.