Five Copyright Fights That Outlived Their Headlines

On 22 June, Guitar World reported that Thomann, which calls itself the world's largest music retailer, had filed suit against Fender over its recent wave of cease-and-desist letters. Thomann's own in-house brand, Harley Benton, received one of those letters.

The retailer was founded in 1954, the same year Fender launched the Stratocaster, and has carried the brand for more than 70 years. It is now the first company to take the guitar maker to court over the body shape. The legal trigger came in March, according to Guitar World. A default ruling from the Regional Court of Dusseldorf granted Fender "enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape" in the EU. Two months later, cease-and-desist letters went out to companies Fender believed were producing Strat copies, including family-owned LsL Instruments and PRS Guitars. Fender has since framed its actions as "working directly with companies to find practical paths forward", but the move has drawn criticism from prominent YouTubers, some of whom cut ties with the company.

Thomann says it is acting for others too. Its blog statement names "custom shop brands and innovators" including Tyler, Tom Anderson, Suhr, LsL, Maybach, Pensa, FGN and PRS as firms it believes are now at risk.

"Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute," said CEO Hans Thomann. "We therefore see it as our responsibility to have this matter clarified in court not only for our own company, but for all parties involved." The retailer's argument tracks one made by industry lawyer Ronald Bienstock: that the Stratocaster is not a copyrightable work of art, as the Dusseldorf court ruled, and that its design and success come down to ergonomics. "The history of the Stratocaster has not been written by one company alone," the Thomann statement reads. "It has been shaped by musicians, luthiers, developers and manufacturers around the world."

YouTube versus SESAC

The most visible copyright disruption of the past two years did not involve a courtroom at all. On a Saturday in late September 2024, songs from Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Green Day, Kanye West and Burna Boy vanished from YouTube and YouTube Music in the United States. Viewers got a short message: "This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country."

SESAC stands for the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers. The Verge reported that the organisation has been around since 1930 and, according to its website, licenses the public performance of more than 1.5 million songs for more than 15,000 affiliated songwriters, composers and music publishers. It is smaller than BMI and ASCAP, but its portfolio includes major names. Blackstone acquired the organisation in 2017.

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. We take copyright very seriously and as a result, content represented by SESAC is no longer available on YouTube in the US. We are in active conversations with SESAC and are hoping to reach a new deal as soon as possible.

That statement came from YouTube spokesperson Mariana de Felice, who responded to an inquiry from The Verge. An unnamed source cited by Variety suggested the takedown could be a negotiating tactic, because "the previous deal actually does not expire until next week". By Monday afternoon YouTube had announced a new deal and said the missing music would be restored "over the next day or two".

A skater, a Minions routine and a last-minute reprieve

Music clearance problems look different when you have a routine to perform. The Guardian reported on 3 February that Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté had been spared a last-minute scramble after a copyright dispute threatened to block his use of Minions music at the Milano Cortina Winter Games.

The six-time Spanish national champion, making his Olympic debut in the men's singles event, learned late the previous week that the routine he had performed all season would not be cleared for Olympic use. 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 the European championships in Sheffield. On Tuesday he thanked fans after Universal granted permission. "Because of you Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights for this one special occasion," he wrote on Instagram, adding that a couple of things still had to be tied up with the other two pieces of music in the programme.

The ISU director-general, Colin Smith, described the problem to the Guardian at last year's world championships in Boston as structural. "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." Smith, who previously oversaw Fifa World Cup tournament operations from 2015 to 2023, said he had held direct discussions with major rights-holders, one of which agreed the absence of a facilitated process was "a strange situation". The ISU is pursuing what Smith called a "multi-pronged approach", including work with an existing platform that handles rights issues across other sports, and coordination with the IOC.

Other skaters have not been so lucky. Canadian ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac learned late last year that two Prince songs planned for their 1990s-themed rhythm dance could not be cleared for Olympic use, despite being approved for the rest of the season. Canadian pairs skaters Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps abandoned plans to use a cover of a Phil Collins track after being quoted a licensing fee in the tens of thousands of dollars. At the Beijing Olympics in 2022, American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier were hit with a copyright lawsuit over a cover of House of the Rising Sun. The case was settled privately for an undisclosed sum understood by the Guardian to be around $1.4m, and Knierim later described the dispute as casting a "bittersweet" shadow over the performance.

Anne Frank, VPNs and the CJEU

Some disputes turn on whether a website is even aimed at the country blocking it. TorrentFreak reported on 25 September 2024 that the Dutch Supreme Court had referred three questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union in a long-running fight over the Anne Frank manuscripts. Anne Frank died in 1945; her father Otto published the first printed copies in 1947 and established the Anne Frank Fonds in Switzerland in 1963, appointing it as his sole heir.

The Fonds owns the copyrights. The original manuscripts are protected in the Netherlands until 2037, and the scholarly edition published by the Dutch Anne Frank Stichting is blocked for Dutch visitors. The Fonds argued that because people can bypass geo-blocking with a VPN, the manuscripts should not be published online at all. Lower courts dismissed that argument, finding the defendants had taken reasonable measures. The Fonds appealed, lost, and took the case to the Dutch Supreme Court, which asked the CJEU how to interpret blocking and VPN use under Article 3(1) of the Copyright Directive.

The questions are narrow but the consequences are not. TorrentFreak noted that if state-of-the-art geo-blocking is not enough to satisfy copyright concerns, rightsholders could in theory pursue publishers and platforms that rely on it, which would make geographical licences impossible to enforce for streaming services and sites far beyond one manuscript archive.

CanLII and Caseway settle, quietly

Not every dispute ends in a ruling. BetaKit reported on 26 March that the Canadian Legal Information Institute and Vancouver-based AI startup Caseway AI had settled their copyright case. CanLII filed suit in the British Columbia Supreme Court in November 2024, alleging that Caseway built a business by wrongfully taking CanLII's work through a bulk and systemic download from its database, without permission or compensation.

The terms are confidential. A CanLII blog post said the organisation "continues its work providing broad public access to primary legal information", while Caseway "continues developing technology solutions for organizations that operate in complex, document-heavy environments". A Caseway news release struck a different tone, calling the outcome "a clear shift away from attempting to slow technological progress through litigation" and saying that "for the first time in the legal tech space, a dispute of this scale between a legal data institution and an AI company has concluded with a forward-looking resolution rather than a prolonged legal battle".

Both companies say they will move forward independently. The case sits alongside other actions against AI firms, including Canadian news publishers' suit against OpenAI over ChatGPT training and a separate lawsuit against LLM developer Cohere. In legal tech, Burnaby-based Clio took Canadian company Alexi to court in December over a database at the heart of Clio's AI transformation.

A glass dome in Shenzhen

The most personal dispute in this set belongs to Victoria Balva, a Canadian glass artist. Writing on her own site in January 2025, Balva said she was contacted months earlier by a person in Asia about an enormously large stained and leaded glass skylight being built for Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen. The rendering, she said, looked very similar in details and structure to some of her own domes and ceilings.

She wrote to Nikken, the Japanese architectural and interior design company working on the project, and after an exchange of letters the firm conducted an internal investigation. According to Balva's account, Nikken accepted that its employee had looked at her designs while working on the project and appointed a Toronto-based lawyer to handle the case. Balva said she recognised several of her own projects as the source of inspiration, including a 2017 dome in New Haven, Connecticut, a 2012 domed skylight on the Bridle Path in Toronto and a 2009 dome in Hoggs Hollow, Toronto.

She eventually hired Yuri Chumak of Chumack and Company. Under Canadian copyright law, she argues, Nikken's design was a substantial copy of her work. After discussions with Nikken's lawyer, Tony Prenol of Blakes, a new proposed design for the oval leaded glass skylight was sent for approval. Balva confirmed it did not look similar to her work any more, though she noted a couple of minor elements remained. She also wrote that the case had not been fully resolved, that she had incurred unplanned financial costs and that four months of her professional life were taken away while she stopped working on client projects. The Globe and Mail's architecture critic, Alex Bozikovic, covered the story.

Five disputes, five very different endings: a settlement, a court referral, a licensing deal, a reprieve and a lawsuit that is still running. None of them was resolved by the copyright system alone.