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Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, joined by the bestselling American author Scott Turow, filed proceedings on Tuesday alleging that Meta knowingly used pirated copies of textbooks, peer-reviewed scientific journals and novels, among them N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot, to train the systems that now underpin the Silicon Valley group’s generative AI products.
The complaint, which seeks unspecified damages and class-action status on behalf of a far wider pool of rights holders, marks the first time that academic and trade publishers have moved against Meta as a unified front. It also signals a deliberate escalation by an industry that, until now, has largely watched from the sidelines as authors, newspapers and visual artists fought their own corner.
Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, did not mince her words. “Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realised if tech companies prioritise pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” she said.
Meta has signalled it will mount a robust defence. “AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a spokesperson said. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
The case opens yet another front in a war that is rapidly redrawing the commercial map for content owners on both sides of the Atlantic. Dozens of plaintiffs, from The New York Times, which is pursuing OpenAI and Microsoft, to a coalition of authors, news outlets and visual artists, have already filed suit against the leading AI developers. The legal questions hinge on whether ingesting copyrighted material to produce new, “transformative” output qualifies as fair use under American law, and the early rulings have been anything but uniform. Two of the first judges to grapple with the issue reached opposing conclusions last year.
The first major scalp came when Anthropic, the AI company backed by Amazon and Google, agreed in 2025 to pay $1.5 billion (£1.18 billion) to settle a class action brought by a group of authors, a sum that could have ballooned into multiples of that figure had the matter gone to trial.
For UK small and medium-sized enterprises operating in publishing, marketing, education and the creative industries, the implications are far from academic. The absence of a coherent licensing regime has left British rights holders exposed to the same alleged practices, while AI-dependent businesses face mounting uncertainty over which models can be deployed without inheriting legal liability.
Benjamin Woollams, chief executive of TrueRights, argues the sector urgently needs commercial infrastructure capable of matching the speed at which AI models are being built. “Every one of these lawsuits points to the same underlying problem: there’s no standardised way to license creative work and likeness for AI,” he said. “Tech companies aren’t villains for wanting training data, and creators aren’t luddites for wanting to be paid, but the infrastructure to connect them simply hasn’t existed until now. This represents a huge opportunity for those in the industry to build a transparent and trusted licensing framework that allows innovation and creator rights to coexist commercially.”
He points to the influencer marketing economy, worth tens of billions of pounds globally and constructed almost entirely on rights licensing, as evidence that the commercial template already exists. “Brands and talent collaborate every day on an enormous scale. The commercial appetite for licensed content is there, the economic model is proven, and creators are increasingly aware of how their likeness and IP are used. What’s been missing in AI is a transparent, trusted way to license at the speed and scale these models require.”
Without such guardrails, Woollams warns, the drumbeat of litigation will only grow louder. “This sort of friction and litigation will continue to plague the industry, which will have negative knock-on effects on the kind of collaboration that should be powering the next generation of creative work, where AI platforms, advertisers and talent can actually build together.”
For Meta, the stakes extend well beyond the immediate price tag. A successful class certification could expose the group to claims from thousands of rights holders, while an adverse ruling would reverberate across an industry that has built its competitive edge on the unrestricted ingestion of vast corpora of human-authored work. For Britain’s SME publishers and creators, the case is a reminder that the rules of engagement with generative AI remain very much under construction, and that the courts, for now, are doing the drafting.
Read more:
Publishers take Meta to court in landmark AI copyright showdown
In a decision likely to be studied across the SME community, a small financial-trading education business has seen off TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited, the British arm of ByteDance, one of the world’s most valuable technology companies, in a two-year trade mark dispute before the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO).
TickTickTrader Ltd, an Isle of Man-based platform that trains aspiring futures traders, applied in April 2023 to register the mark ‘TickTickTrader’. The name is drawn from trading floor terminology: a ‘tick’ is the smallest permissible price movement on a futures exchange. TikTok’s legal team, drawn from one of the world’s largest law firms, opposed the application outright, arguing that the name was confusingly similar to its own globally recognised brand and risked diluting its reputation. An accompanying cease-and-desist letter gave the start-up 14 days to withdraw the application, abandon the name and sign undertakings.
For a company of around 50 employees, the demand was existential. It refused.
On 19 February 2026, Hearing Officer Mrs E Fisher dismissed both grounds of TikTok’s opposition in full and ordered TikTok to pay TickTickTrader’s costs. The appeal window has now closed and the decision is final.
The Hearing Officer found the two marks to be visually and aurally similar only to a medium degree, and, crucially, conceptually dissimilar. Where TikTok evokes the sound of a clock, TickTickTrader was held to conjure the image of a trader methodically ticking off positions, gain by incremental gain. The word ‘trader’, the officer ruled, was neither irrelevant nor purely descriptive: it formed an integral part of the overall impression of the mark.
“I find there is no likelihood of direct or indirect confusion,” the decision states. The officer also rejected TikTok’s argument that consumers would assume TickTickTrader was a brand extension in the same family as TikTok Shop, TikTok Pay or TikTok Live, describing that logic as unconvincing. “I find that there is no link between the marks,” she wrote.
She added that buyers of education and training services, typically high-attention, considered purchases, were highly unlikely to confuse two marks with such clear visual, conceptual and commercial differences. TikTok’s reputation, however considerable, did not entitle it to monopolise the market.
TickTickTrader fought the opposition with Trade Mark Wizards, the London-based intellectual property firm backed by Lord Sugar, who is also a director of the company. For Trade Mark Wizards, the case is emblematic of a wider pattern in which large corporations rely on the disproportionate commercial pressure of legal proceedings to push smaller rivals into surrender, regardless of the underlying merits.
It is a pattern this magazine has documented before, from Rolex demanding that a Devon children’s clock start-up change its name to the steady stream of cease-and-desist letters dropped on UK founders by global brands. As Business Matters has previously argued in its guidance for founders accused of trade mark infringement, not every claim is legally sound, and capitulating without a proper assessment can prove far more costly than fighting back.
Lord Sugar, director at Trade Mark Wizards, said the TickTickTrader case carried a familiar shape.
“I’ve been in business long enough to recognise this pattern straight away,” he said. “Big companies think they can throw their weight around and that smaller businesses will just roll over because they can’t afford the fight. That’s not how it’s supposed to work. What mattered here is that the claim didn’t stack up — and when it was properly tested, it failed. You don’t get to own every name that sounds vaguely similar to your own just because you’re a big brand. If you’re right, you’re right. If you’re not, you lose. Simple as that.”
Oliver Oguz, managing director of Trade Mark Wizards, was equally direct. “The playbook used to be simple,” he said. “If you’re a big company and a small business gets in your way, you throw lawyers at it and wait for them to blink. That playbook is finished. This decision is proof that the rules apply to everyone, regardless of how many zeros are in your legal budget. TikTok had every resource in the world at its disposal. They still lost because the facts didn’t support them.”
A board member of TickTickTrader described the moment the ruling came through.
“We were effectively being asked to give up our brand entirely. For a small business, that’s not just a legal issue, it’s your identity, your work, everything you’ve built. It would have been easy to walk away, but we knew the name meant something and we believed we were right to keep it. Having the right support around us made all the difference.”
For start-ups and SMEs watching from the sidelines, the case offers three practical lessons. First, the UKIPO’s standard opposition process is structured, evidence-led, and decided on the law — not on the relative size of the parties. Second, a defence grounded in the genuine meaning and commercial context of a brand name can defeat a much larger opponent. Third, as our own legal contributors have long argued in pieces on brand protection and the power of IP, independent legal advice from specialists, rather than reflexive capitulation, is often the decisive factor in determining whether a name survives.
The UKIPO has confirmed that TickTickTrader may now proceed to full trade mark registration, which the company has also secured in several key global territories. TikTok has been ordered to pay £1,700 in costs. The figure is modest in headline terms, but reflects the tribunal’s clear view on the merits, and, for the wider SME community, the symbolism is anything but small.
Read more:
How a 50-person start-up beat TikTok at the IPO – with Lord Sugar in its corner
A California woman and her husband are dead after she was swindled out of thousands of dollars by a person allegedly posing as actor Tom Selleck, according to the couple's close friend.
Karen...
The decision, handed down at the First-tier Tribunal, means HMRC will be denied £584,000 in employment taxes it had argued were owed. The department retains the right to appeal, but the verdict has already been seized upon by tax specialists as a potentially seismic moment for the millions of contractors, freelancers and businesses operating in the UK’s flexible labour market.
Specialist contractor insurance provider Qdos described the outcome as one of the most significant employment status rulings in history, warning that it lays bare a “fundamental flaw” in HMRC’s own Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool, the digital instrument introduced in 2017 and used millions of times to determine whether a worker should be taxed as employed or self-employed.
The case turned on two principles long regarded as the bedrock of employment case law: mutuality of obligation (MOO), whether a worker is obliged to accept work and the engager obliged to provide it, and control, namely the extent to which a business directs how services are performed. The tribunal ruled that referees were neither mutually obliged to work for PGMOL nor sufficiently controlled in how they performed their duties to be classed as employees.
Seb Maley, chief executive of Qdos, said the ruling directly undermines HMRC’s interpretation of the very rules it polices.
“This landmark verdict directly challenges HMRC’s very understanding of employment status, exposing a fundamental flaw in the tax office’s employment status tool, which is in desperate need of an overhaul,” he said.
“For years, HMRC has insisted that mutuality of obligation exists in every contract, so much so that its CEST tool barely scratches the surface on it. The latest twist in this case highlights the need for a rigorous review of CEST, which has been used millions of times to set the employment status of individuals, in turn determining whether they pay tax as a self-employed worker or employee.”
Maley added that the result should reassure firms that engage contractors. “Make no mistake, this result is good news for businesses that engage contractors and self-employed workers, ultimately because it proves that factors like mutuality of obligation and control really aren’t as narrow as HMRC has been contending.”
He also took aim at the sheer length of the proceedings. “With the first hearing in 2018, we’re nearly a decade into this case, the result of which could yet be appealed. If that doesn’t highlight the desperate need for the simplification of employment status, I don’t know what does.”
The dispute stretches back to PGMOL’s engagement of referees as self-employed contractors during the 2014/15 and 2015/16 tax years. HMRC opened the first front in 2018, arguing at the First-tier Tribunal that the officials should have been treated as employees because they were mutually obliged to work for PGMOL.
The FTT disagreed, finding insufficient mutuality of obligation. HMRC appealed and lost again at the Upper Tribunal in 2020, which upheld the original ruling that the minimum test for employment had not been met.
A further HMRC appeal took the case to the Court of Appeal in 2022, which reversed the earlier decisions and concluded that mutuality of obligation did exist on each match day, sending the dispute back to the FTT for reconsideration.
PGMOL escalated matters to the Supreme Court in 2024, where its appeal was dismissed, again sending the case back to the FTT. It is at this latest hearing that PGMOL’s position has now finally been vindicated, with the judge ruling that the referees were neither mutually obliged to work nor sufficiently controlled by PGMOL to be employees.
For Britain’s SME community, which leans heavily on freelance and contract labour, the decision is more than a footnote in a niche sporting dispute. It strikes at the heart of how HMRC interprets and enforces the very employment status rules it designed, and adds further pressure on Whitehall to deliver the long-promised simplification of a system that has tied businesses, workers and the courts in knots for years.
Read more:
HMRC loses landmark £584,000 tax battle as referees ruled self-employed
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