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AI is scrambling decades of global copyright and fair-use precedent, presenting new challenges for content distributed across borders.

Why it matters: Large language models can train on content in countries where that use is legal and then be deployed in countries where it's not.

This poses an existential threat for creative industries, which risk losing control over how their intellectual property is used.

Zoom in: Open models are particularly difficult to contain because they can be downloaded, modified and redeployed.

Open Chinese AI models have already been downloaded more than 10 billion times, Vermillio CEO Dan Neely says, likely spawning many times that number of customized versions built for specific uses.

"The training horse is never going back in the barn," he says. "The debate will increasingly shift toward outputs and the new data being fed into these models."

Neely noted a post-trained version of China's open MiniMax H3 model, released by Fal.ai last month, can generate video faster than it plays. Within days, developers were demonstrating applications, including video featuring recognizable Hollywood characters.

Zoom out: This dynamic could force global platforms to treat the exact same AI-generated content differently depending on where a user lives.

"It's going to be a nightmare to handle," Deezer vice president of research Manuel Moussallam says. "The big question is who's going to audit this model and determine that the rules are OK in one territory and not the same in a different one."

State of play: New licensing and permissions infrastructure is already being designed to address that question.

Really Simple Licensing (RSL), a machine-readable open standard, lets copyright holders specify how AI platforms can use their content and set geographic parameters, co-founder Doug Leeds told Axios. 

Companies like Snowflake and Cloudflare are also offering solutions at the cloud-serving level. 

Snowflake allows publishers to license their content for retrieval through its Cortex Knowledge Extensions marketplace and set regional restrictions. 

Cloudflare lets publishers charge or block AI companies from scraping their content against a set of parameters, including geography. 

Context: Fights around fair use mainly center on two debates: one, whether AI firms can legally use copyrighted works to train their large language models, and two, whether they can reproduce or closely resemble those works in the outputs.

The Justice Department recently indicated it believes using copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use, but outputs aren't necessarily covered by the same legal principles. 

The DOJ's position is not binding, but if a court adopts its reasoning, that could make it harder for copyright holders to enforce training-based infringement claims under U.S. law, including those against foreign AI firms.

Between the lines: Hollywood's fight with China's MiniMax illustrates how studios are trying to leverage U.S. copyright protections to target AI models developed overseas, but whose outputs can be used in the U.S. 

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal filed a joint lawsuit against MiniMax in 2025 in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws protecting their work against AI models internationally.

Getty Images' litigation against Stability AI shows how copyright protections can stop at borders, even when models are distributed beyond them.

Getty filed copyright infringement lawsuits against Stability AI in the U.S. and U.K. in 2023, but was ultimately forced to abandon its training infringement claim in the U.K. because it couldn't establish its models were trained there.

Elsewhere, German music rights group GEMA has won two copyright cases against U.S. AI companies.

A Munich court ruled against OpenAI in November over ChatGPT's storage and reproduction of protected song lyrics.

In July, the same court largely sided with GEMA against Suno in a case involving songs used to train its models in the U.S. and reproduced in Europe. OpenAI is appealing its ruling. The Suno ruling is not yet final.

What to watch: Some IP holders are trying different legal tactics to circumvent trickier fair-use cases.

Those strategies could present new opportunities for content publishers to protect their works from infringement overseas, Leeds noted. 

Reddit, for example, sued Anthropic last year, alleging it violated Reddit's terms of service by scraping its content.

AI scrambles copyright rules across borders

Large language models can train on content in countries where that use is legal and then be deployed in countries where it's not.

Illustration of a smartphone being cut in three by two lines of binary code.

Illustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios. Stock: Getty Images

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AI scrambles copyright rules across borders

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