Five Copyright Fights That Show a System Struggling to Cope

On Saturday 28 September 2024, some of the most watched music videos on YouTube and YouTube Music stopped playing. Instead of Adele's "Rolling in the Deep", Kendrick Lamar, Britney Spears, Green Day, Kanye West or Burna Boy, viewers got a short notice: "This video contains content from SESAC. It is not available in your country." The Verge reported the blackout, and the fact that it was resolved by Monday afternoon, when YouTube said a new deal had been reached and the missing music would be restored "over the next day or two".

That is the shape of most modern copyright disputes. Not a courtroom verdict years later, but a sudden failure of access, followed by a quiet settlement nobody outside the parties gets to read.

What SESAC is, and why it mattered

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

YouTube's spokesperson Mariana de Felice told The Verge the company had "held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal" and was "unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration". She added that content represented by SESAC was no longer available on YouTube in the US. An unnamed source cited by Variety suggested the timing was itself a tactic, saying "the previous deal actually does not expire until next week".

The detail that matters for anyone trying to understand the system is messier than the headlines. SESAC publishes a searchable database of its repertory, and even a 44,267-page PDF of the complete list, but not every song listed there was blocked. One listing for Kanye West's "Power" was blocked while the music video version kept streaming. Copyright clearance is not a switch. It is a set of overlapping claims, and which one applies depends on which version of a work you are looking at.

A skater, a Minion, and a missing clearance platform

In February 2026, the Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté faced a version of the same problem with much higher stakes. The six-time Spanish national champion, preparing for his Olympic debut at the Milano Cortina Winter Games, learned late the previous week that the routine he had performed all season would not be cleared for Olympic use. 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 the European championships in Sheffield.

On the Tuesday, he posted on Instagram that Universal had given permission. "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," he wrote, 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 underlying problem to the Guardian at the previous 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 conversations with major rights-holders about building something more workable. "I've had direct conversations with one of the big publishing and music companies, and they fully agree it's a strange situation that there isn't a facilitated process, and they're determined to help us find one," he told the Guardian. He added that the ISU was pursuing a "multi-pronged approach" and working with the IOC and the music industry.

The pattern is not new, and it is not cheap. At Beijing 2022, the American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier were hit with a copyright lawsuit over a cover version of House of the Rising Sun. The case was later settled privately for an undisclosed sum understood by the Guardian to be around $1.4m. 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. The Canadian pairs skaters Deanna Stellato-Dudek and Maxime Deschamps abandoned a Phil Collins cover after being quoted a licensing fee in the tens of thousands of dollars.

When the copying is architectural

Copyright disputes also reach into buildings. The Canadian glass artist Victoria Balva wrote in January 2025 that she had been contacted by someone in Asia about a 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 her own glass domes and ceilings.

She wrote to the Japanese architectural and interior design firm Nikken, which was 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. She later dealt with Nikken's lawyer Tony Prenol of Blakes, and eventually hired Yuri Chumak of Chumack and Company to represent her.

In her account, a new proposed design for the oval leaded glass skylight was sent for approval. She noticed it still contained a couple of minor elements from her work but generally no longer looked similar, which she confirmed. The case has not been fully resolved, and she says the dispute cost her four months of professional life and forced her to stop work on projects for existing clients because she could not deliver the quality she normally would. The Globe and Mail's architecture critic Alex Bozikovic covered the story.

Geo-blocking, VPNs, and a question for the EU's top court

One of the most consequential disputes is also one of the least visible. The Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss organisation Otto Frank established in 1963 and appointed as his sole heir, owns the copyrights to the diary. The Dutch Anne Frank Stichting would like to publish the manuscripts worldwide, but the Fonds has not given permission, and since parts of the manuscript were first published in 1986, Dutch copyrights remain valid until 2037.

The Stichting geo-blocks the manuscripts for Dutch visitors. The Fonds argued in court that this is not enough, because people can bypass blocking with a VPN, and that the manuscripts should therefore not be published online at all. The lower court dismissed that argument, finding the defendants had taken reasonable measures, and the appeal was also dismissed. The case is now before the Dutch Supreme Court, which has referred three questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union.

The questions, as TorrentFreak reported, concern Article 3(1) of the Copyright Directive: whether a publication can only be a "communication to the public" in a country if it is directed at that country; whether state-of-the-art geo-blocking prevents such a communication when a VPN can circumvent it; and, if it does not, whether the publisher is then violating copyright law by publishing at all.

The stakes go well beyond one diary. Geo-blocking is the standard mechanism behind geographical licensing for streaming services, broadcasters and news sites. If it is legally insufficient because a VPN exists, the practical basis for territorial licensing gets much harder to defend.

Two more fights, two more closed doors

Legal databases and guitars may look unrelated, but the disputes follow the same logic. In March 2026, the Canadian Legal Information Institute and the Vancouver AI startup Caseway AI announced they had settled a copyright case. CanLII had sued in the British Columbia Supreme Court in November 2024, alleging Caseway built a business by taking CanLII's work through a bulk and systemic download without permission or compensation. The settlement 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 organisations that operate in complex, document-heavy environments". Both said they consider the matter fully and finally resolved.

In June 2026, the German music retailer Thomann became the first company to take Fender to court over its wave of cease-and-desist letters in the Stratocaster dispute. Thomann, founded in 1954, the same year Fender launched the Stratocaster, said it was acting on behalf of other brands and smaller manufacturers, naming Tyler, Tom Anderson, Suhr, LsL, Maybach, Pensa, FGN and PRS as firms it believes are now at risk. "After careful consideration, we have decided to take legal action," a statement on the Thomann blog reads. "We have done so because we are convinced that the questions raised here go far beyond a mere legal dispute and affect the future of diversity, innovation and competition in our industry."

Thomann's arguments mirror those of the industry lawyer Ronald Bienstock: that the Stratocaster is not a copyrightable work of art, as the Dusseldorf court has ruled, and that its design and success come down to ergonomics. Fender's legal moves stem from a default ruling by the Regional Court of Dusseldorf in March granting "enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape" in the EU, followed by cease-and-desist letters in May.

What connects all of these cases is not a shortage of law. It is a shortage of process. A performing rights organisation, a figure skater, a glass artist, a legal database, a guitar retailer and the heirs of a wartime diarist are all dealing with the same fragmented terrain, where the outcome usually depends on who can afford to keep pushing and who gets a deal signed before the content goes dark.