Copyright fights in 2026: skating, guitars, legal data and a 1930s music rights body

The disputes that made copyright news over the past two years rarely involve anyone selling bootleg copies. They involve a skater's short program, a guitar body shape, a searchable database of court rulings and a 44,267-page PDF of song titles. Digital distribution has made copying cheap and clearing rights expensive.

Start with the most visible case. Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté, the six-time Spanish national champion, learned late last week that the routine he had performed all season would not be cleared for Olympic use, the Guardian reported on 3 February 2026. The program is built around music from the Minions films, and he had submitted it through the International Skating Union's recommended rights-clearance process months earlier. He competed with it at last month's European championships in Sheffield without any problem. Then, days before his Olympic debut, the clearance vanished.

On Tuesday, Universal gave permission for the Milano Cortina Games. "Because of you Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights for this one special occasion," Guarino Sabaté wrote on Instagram, thanking fans who reposted and shared his case.

One clearance platform, many buckets of rights

The ISU's director-general, Colin Smith, described the underlying problem to the Guardian at last year's world championships in Boston. "It's a complex issue, frankly, because the music industry has no common clearance platform," he said. "There are multiple buckets of rights, and within those buckets the clearance process isn't done on a single platform. Tracking tools have improved, but the facilitated process just isn't there."

Smith said he had held direct talks with major rights-holders and was working with the IOC on a cross-sport fix that could cover gymnastics and artistic swimming as well. The costs are not theoretical. Canadian ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac lost two Prince songs from their 1990s-themed rhythm dance. Canadian pairs skaters Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps abandoned a Phil Collins cover after being quoted a fee in the tens of thousands of dollars. At Beijing 2022, American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier were sued over a House of the Rising Sun cover; the case settled privately for a sum the Guardian understood to be around $1.4m.

Music rights organisations themselves are not simple to navigate. YouTube pulled songs by Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Green Day, Kanye West and Burna Boy from YouTube and YouTube Music on a Saturday in late September 2024, The Verge reported. Visitors saw a message saying the video contained content from SESAC and was not available in their country.

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.

That was YouTube spokesperson Mariana de Felice, in a statement to The Verge. SESAC, the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, has existed since 1930 and licenses public performance of more than 1.5 million songs for 15,000-plus affiliated songwriters, composers and publishers, according to its website. It is smaller than BMI and ASCAP and was acquired by Blackstone in 2017. Variety, citing an unnamed source, suggested the takedown might have been a negotiating tactic because the previous deal did not expire until the following week. A new agreement was announced the following Monday, with music to be restored over a day or two.

Guitar shapes and bulk downloads

Hardware has its own front line. German retailer Thomann, the world's largest music retailer, is suing Fender over the cease-and-desist campaign that followed a March default ruling at the Regional Court of Dusseldorf, which granted Fender "enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape" in the EU. Guitar World reported on 22 June 2026 that Thomann, whose Harley Benton brand received its own cease-and-desist, is the first company to take Fender to court. Thomann says it is acting for other builders, naming Tyler, Tom Anderson, Suhr, LsL, Maybach, Pensa, FGN and PRS as at risk.

"We used to be a small music store ourselves and know exactly where we have come from," Thomann CEO Hans Thomann said. "Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute." The retailer's argument, echoing industry lawyer Ronald Bienstock, is that the Stratocaster is not a copyrightable work of art and that its success comes from ergonomics.

Data is the third front. The Canadian Legal Information Institute sued Vancouver-based Caseway AI in November 2024 in the British Columbia Supreme Court, alleging the startup built a business by bulk-downloading CanLII's database without permission or payment. BetaKit reported on 26 March 2026 that the two settled, with confidential terms. CanLII said it continues providing broad public access to primary legal information; Caseway said it continues developing technology for document-heavy organisations. Caseway called the outcome a shift away from slowing technological progress through litigation. The settlement came as Canadian publishers pursue OpenAI and Cohere over training data.

Not every fight ends in a courtroom. Canadian glass artist Victoria Balva wrote in January 2025 that she confronted the Japanese design firm Nikken over a stained glass skylight planned for Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters, which she said copied her domes and ceilings. Nikken investigated, accepted that an employee had looked at her designs and appointed a Toronto lawyer. Balva later confirmed a revised design no longer looked similar, though she said the case was not fully resolved and cost her four months of work.

That pattern repeats across all of these rows: the copying is easy, the clearing is not, and the people with the least leverage are usually the ones who lose the most time.