News-June-22-2026

June 22, 2026 — A California federal judge allowed adult-film producers' copyright claims against Meta to proceed, Getty Images announced an OpenAI display partnership for licensed visual content, UK legal-tech company Garfield AI reported its first successful court-trial outcome after receiving Solicitors Regulation Authority approval, and X asked the FTC to end a long-running Twitter/X data-handling consent order after corporate mergers involving xAI and SpaceX.

Contents

1. Judge Lets Strike 3 Copyright Claims Against Meta Proceed
2. Getty Images Announces Display Partnership with OpenAI
3. Garfield AI Reports First UK Court-Trial Win After SRA Approval
4. Musk Asks FTC to End X Data-Handling Order After xAI and SpaceX Mergers

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Judge Lets Strike 3 Copyright Claims Against Meta Proceed

U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee denied Meta Platforms, Inc.'s motion to dismiss copyright claims brought by Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media, allowing direct, contributory, and vicarious infringement theories to continue at the pleading stage. The court held that the alleged BitTorrent copying itself could satisfy the infringement element even without proof at the pleading stage that the films were used to train a particular AI model. The order also rejected Meta's argument that the complaint only described personal downloads by employees or visitors, finding that repeated patterns across corporate IP addresses plausibly supported a coordinated-download inference.

The ruling is significant for AI training-data litigation because it lets the plaintiffs proceed on a theory centered on alleged acquisition of copyrighted works through BitTorrent, rather than requiring the complaint to tie each work to a specific model-training run at the motion-to-dismiss stage. The case remains at an early procedural stage, and the order does not decide whether Meta actually infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights or whether the plaintiffs can prove AI-training use in discovery.

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Getty Images Announces Display Partnership with OpenAI

Getty Images announced a display partnership with OpenAI under which Getty visual content can appear in ChatGPT search and discovery features. Getty described the arrangement as a step toward linking AI-assisted search with licensed visual content and said the partnership is intended to expand discovery of Getty Images' editorial and creative libraries. The announcement is relevant to AI copyright and licensing policy because it shows a major image-rights holder choosing a licensing-and-display model with OpenAI while separate copyright litigation over AI training and image generation continues elsewhere.

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Garfield AI Reports First UK Court-Trial Win After SRA Approval

Garfield AI, an AI-powered legal-services provider authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, reported that it helped freelancer Tamires Camal Taquidir recover £7,000 in unpaid HR-service fees at Wandsworth County Court. The platform prepared pre-action correspondence, issued the claim, and generated trial materials, while junior barrister Dominic Li of One Essex Court handled the in-court advocacy. City A.M. reported that the matter followed a three-hour May trial and that the court ruled for the claimant while dismissing the defendant's counterclaim.

The development is relevant to AI law and legal-services regulation because it shows a regulated AI-led workflow being used for small-claims litigation support rather than merely as an internal law-firm tool. Lawyer Monthly characterized the matter as a test of how SRA-approved AI legal services may affect solicitor accountability, routine debt claims, and access-to-justice economics.

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Musk Asks FTC to End X Data-Handling Order After xAI and SpaceX Mergers

The Federal Trade Commission opened a public-comment period on X Corp.'s petition to set aside or modify the FTC's privacy and data-security order concerning Twitter/X, with comments due July 2, 2026. Ars Technica reported that the order stems from Twitter's 2022 settlement over using phone numbers and email addresses provided for two-factor authentication for targeted advertising, and that the order requires independent audits and FTC access to compliance information through 2042.

X's petition argues that the order should be ended because Twitter no longer exists as a separate company after X was merged into xAI and xAI was later folded into SpaceX. The petition also invokes the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, arguing that X and xAI are part of a corporate family at the center of U.S. AI ambitions and that continued compliance obligations divert engineering resources from innovation to paperwork.

The development is significant for AI law because it links legacy platform-privacy enforcement to AI corporate integration and training-data governance after X's data assets became part of the xAI/SpaceX corporate structure. Public comments already filed in the FTC docket include concerns that the combined entity may have incentives to train AI systems on user data, making continued FTC oversight more important rather than less important.