Four copyright fights where the money ran out before the law did

The copyright dispute that reaches a courtroom is the exception. The ones in this file mostly ended somewhere else: a licensing deal signed before the lights went up, a settlement no one will describe, a glass dome redesigned after a lawyer's letter.

Start with figure skating, because it has the cleanest ending. The Spanish skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté, a six-time national champion, learned late last week that his short program, built around music from the Minions films, would not be cleared for the Milano Cortina Winter Games. He had submitted the music through the International Skating Union's recommended rights-clearance process months earlier and skated it all season, including at last month's European championships in Sheffield, without a problem. The Guardian reported the reversal on 3 February: Universal gave permission for what Guarino Sabaté called "this one special occasion." Two other pieces of music in his program were still being tied up, he said on Instagram.

He was lucky to have fans loud enough to move a studio.

Others were not. The Canadian ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac lost two Prince songs planned for their 1990s-themed rhythm dance, cleared for the season but not for the Olympics. 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, the Guardian reported. And at Beijing 2022, the American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier faced a copyright lawsuit over a cover of House of the Rising Sun that was later settled privately for a sum the Guardian understood to be around $1.4m. Knierim called it a "bittersweet" shadow on the performance.

The ISU's director-general, Colin Smith, told the Guardian the problem is 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."

Music rights are only one front. On YouTube, Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Nirvana, Britney Spears, Green Day and Burna Boy vanished from the platform on a Saturday in late September 2024, replaced by a notice about SESAC, the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, which has licensed public performances since 1930 and, by its own count, represents more than 1.5 million songs for over 15,000 songwriters, composers and publishers. Blackstone bought the organization in 2017. A YouTube spokesperson told The Verge the two sides could not reach "an equitable agreement" before the deal expired; Variety, citing an unnamed source, reported the previous deal did not actually expire until the following week. A new deal was announced on Monday, with music restored "over the next day or two."

Then there are the disputes with no deal at all. The Canadian Legal Information Institute sued the Vancouver AI startup Caseway in November 2024, alleging a bulk and systemic download of its legal database. The settlement, announced in March 2026, is confidential; both sides said they would move forward independently, and Caseway claimed the outcome showed a shift away from "attempting to slow technological progress through litigation."

The glass artist Victoria Balva never got that far. A Japanese design firm, Nikken, was working on a stained glass skylight for Huawei's Shenzhen headquarters when she noticed the rendering resembled her domes. Nikken investigated and accepted that an employee had looked at her work, she wrote. A new design was drawn up; a few minor elements remained. Four months of her professional life went, she said, and the case has not been fully resolved.