Elon Musk’s company SpaceX has finally joined the AI Copyright Wars. The plaintiffs’ firm Stris & Maher just filed 3 copyright suits against SpaceX Superintelligence for alleged infringement in developing models for xAI and SpaceX.
Stris & Maher now assumes the lead in filing the most copyright suits against AI companies. Stris & Maher has overtaken the Saveri firm, which has long held the lead among plaintiffs’ firms.
New Strategy of Stris & Maher: Attacking Book Scanning Found to Be Fair Use by Judge Alsup
These 3 new copyright suits take the same strategy as the 5 copyright lawsuits just filed by Stris & Maher against Meta, now before Judge Chhabria. The Complaints adopt the “Shadow Library” strategy, which many lawsuits already utilize. But the Complaints allege that book scanning of lawfully owned copies to prepare digital versions for use in AI training is not fair use. In Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Alsup ruled such format-changed copies Anthropic made were fair uses. These new lawsuits apparently disagree with that decision. Although the Complaints cite Bartz on this point, they do so only for the factual element of Anthropic’s book scanning project.
DOWNLOAD COMPLAINT IN COGNELLA V. SPACEX
DOWNLOAD COMPLAINT IN CAMBRONNE V. SPACEX
DOWNLOAD COMPLAINT IN CHICKEN SOUP FOR THE SOUL V. SPACEX
88 Copyright Lawsuits filed in 2026. 100 is next.
The 3 new lawsuits put the total number of copyright suits v. AI companies filed in 2026 at 88. At the current pace, we should surpass 100 by the end of this year. The total number of cases is now 164 suits.
