# Stevens v. CoreLogic: The Double Scienter Rule for Stripped Metadata

> The Ninth Circuit held a Section 1202(b) plaintiff must prove the defendant knew stripping copyright metadata would likely induce or conceal infringement.

Topic: Copyright  |  Author: Lidiia Levitska  |  Source: Intellectual Property Law (outsideipcounsel.com)
Canonical: https://outsideipcounsel.com/blog/stevens-v-corelogic-1202b-scienter-metadata/


In *Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc.*, 899 F.3d 666 (9th Cir. 2018), the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit set the mental-state bar for claims that a defendant illegally stripped copyright management information from digital works. Two professional real-estate photographers alleged that CoreLogic's listing software deleted the metadata embedded in their photographs, violating 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In an opinion by Judge Marsha Berzon decided June 20, 2018, the court affirmed summary judgment for CoreLogic, holding that a § 1202(b) plaintiff must affirmatively show the defendant knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that removing the information would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement. Automated metadata scrubbing, without that knowledge, is not enough.

## At a glance

- **Case:** *Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc.*, 899 F.3d 666 (9th Cir. 2018).
- **Decided:** June 20, 2018; opinion by Judge Marsha S. Berzon; affirming summary judgment for CoreLogic.
- **Holding:** A § 1202(b) plaintiff must make an affirmative showing that the defendant knew or had reasonable grounds to know that its removal or alteration of copyright management information would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. The "double scienter" label for this structure comes from the Eleventh Circuit's later decision in *Victor Elias Photography, LLC v. Ice Portal, Inc.*, 43 F.4th 1313 (11th Cir. 2022), not from *Stevens* itself.
- **Significance:** The controlling appellate standard on § 1202(b) scienter, now a pivotal authority in AI training-data litigation. Final.

## The doctrinal frame: what Section 1202 protects

The DMCA's integrity provisions in 17 U.S.C. § 1202 protect "copyright management information," or CMI, which the statute defines to include the title, author, copyright owner, terms of use, and identifying numbers or symbols conveyed with a work. Section 1202(b) creates civil liability for a person who, without authority, intentionally removes or alters CMI, or distributes works knowing that CMI has been removed, provided the person acts "knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement."

That final clause is the pivot of the statute. It is a single trailing clause that applies to each of the three prohibited acts listed in § 1202(b), and it attaches a second knowledge requirement to the prohibited act. The question in *Stevens* was whether a plaintiff satisfies that clause merely by showing that CMI was removed and that removal makes undetected infringement theoretically possible, or whether the plaintiff must show something more specific about the defendant's awareness. The court read the clause to demand the latter.

## The facts: downsampled photos and lost EXIF data

Robert Stevens and Steven Vandel were professional photographers who licensed their real-estate photographs to agents. Those agents uploaded the photographs to multiple listing services, or MLSs, that ran on software supplied by CoreLogic. The photographs carried metadata embedded in the image files, including EXIF data that could record authorship and copyright information.

CoreLogic's MLS software resized, or downsampled, uploaded images by generating a smaller copy and discarding the original. The image libraries CoreLogic used were unable to read and re-embed the EXIF metadata during this process, so when the software created the resized copy, the metadata attached to the original file did not carry over. The photographers sued, alleging that CoreLogic thereby removed their CMI in violation of § 1202(b) and distributed their images knowing the CMI had been removed. The district court granted summary judgment to CoreLogic, and the photographers appealed.

## The court's reasoning: knowledge of a likely infringement, not just removal

Judge Berzon's opinion parsed the statutory text and concluded that the "knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know" clause imposes an affirmative and distinct burden. It is not satisfied by the truism that stripping identifying information could allow some hypothetical downstream infringer to escape detection. If it were, the clause would be surplusage, because the removal of CMI almost always makes undetected copying marginally more possible. Congress, the court reasoned, would not have written a specific mental-state requirement only to have it collapse into the mere fact of removal.

Instead, the plaintiff must point to evidence that the particular defendant knew, or had reasonable grounds to know, that its removal or distribution would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. That demands some identifiable connection between the defendant's act and a likely infringement, not a generalized possibility. Because the statute is written in the future tense, the court added, a plaintiff need not show that any specific infringement has already occurred, nor knowledge amounting to certainty. What is required is an affirmative showing, "such as by demonstrating a past 'pattern of conduct' or 'modus operandi', that the defendant was aware of the probable future impact of its actions."

The familiar "double scienter" label for this structure does not come from *Stevens* itself, which never uses the phrase. It was coined later by the Eleventh Circuit in *Victor Elias Photography, LLC v. Ice Portal, Inc.*, 43 F.4th 1313 (11th Cir. 2022), which followed *Stevens* and described § 1202(b) as imposing two knowledge requirements: knowledge that CMI was removed or altered without authority, and knowledge that the removal would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement. *Stevens* rested only on the second of those. It expressly declined to decide whether CoreLogic had "intentionally" removed CMI, whether the photographs contained CMI when uploaded, whether the photographers impliedly licensed the removal, or whether a software developer can be liable for third parties' use of its software.

Applied to the record, the photographers' claim failed. They established that CoreLogic's software removed metadata as a byproduct of downsampling, but they offered no evidence that CoreLogic knew this technical process would likely lead to or conceal infringement of their photographs. The removal appeared to be an incidental consequence of image processing, not a step CoreLogic took with awareness that it would facilitate wrongdoing. Because the second scienter element was unmet, the court affirmed summary judgment. The panel also affirmed the district court's discovery rulings, including the denial as moot of the photographers' motion to compel and their Rule 56(d) request, and its denial of their motion to re-tax costs.

## What the decision changed

*Stevens* made the scienter clause the decisive front in § 1202(b) litigation within the Ninth Circuit and a persuasive authority elsewhere. Plaintiffs can no longer rest on the observable fact that a defendant's system deleted metadata. They must marshal facts showing the defendant's awareness that the deletion would probably enable or hide infringement, whether through the defendant's business model, its knowledge of downstream use, or a pattern from which such knowledge can be inferred.

The holding has taken on outsized importance in the current wave of litigation over artificial intelligence. Many suits against AI developers allege that the developers stripped CMI from images, text, and code ingested to train generative models, in violation of § 1202. *Stevens* frames the core question those cases must answer: did the developer know, or have reasonable grounds to know, that removing the identifying information would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal infringement? As of July 2026 that question drives motions to dismiss and summary-judgment briefing across the field, and courts routinely cite *Stevens* as the governing scienter standard.

## Open questions

- **How much circumstantial evidence establishes the second scienter?** *Stevens* rejected the bare possibility of concealment but did not map the full range of facts that would suffice, leaving lower courts to draw the line.
- **Does the standard fit mass, automated ingestion?** Applying a knowledge-of-likely-infringement test to systems that process millions of files programmatically raises questions the 2018 opinion did not confront directly.
- **How does Stevens interact with the identical-copy debate?** Some courts have split over whether § 1202(b) requires that the infringing copy be identical to the original. *Stevens* focused on scienter and did not resolve that separate question.

## Implications for creators and businesses

- **Plaintiffs must plead the defendant's state of mind.** A § 1202(b) complaint should allege specific facts showing the defendant knew removal would likely induce or conceal infringement, not just that metadata disappeared.
- **Incidental technical stripping is defensible.** Businesses whose software removes metadata as a routine byproduct of resizing or reformatting have a strong argument under *Stevens*, provided the removal is not paired with knowledge of likely infringement.
- **Design and document processing choices.** Where feasible, preserve or re-embed CMI during image processing, and keep records showing that any removal was an unintended technical artifact rather than a deliberate facilitation of infringement.
- **AI developers face a defined but real risk.** *Stevens* is a shield, not immunity. Evidence that a developer understood its data pipeline would obscure the provenance of protected works could satisfy the double scienter test.

## Frequently asked questions

**What is the double scienter requirement under Section 1202(b)?**
It is the rule that a plaintiff must prove two mental states. First, the defendant knew copyright management information was removed or altered without authority. Second, the defendant knew or had reasonable grounds to know that the removal would induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement. Proof of removal alone is not enough. The phrase "double scienter" comes from the Eleventh Circuit's decision in *Victor Elias Photography, LLC v. Ice Portal, Inc.* (2022); *Stevens v. CoreLogic* established the second requirement in the Ninth Circuit without using that label.

**Did stripping EXIF metadata violate the DMCA in Stevens v. CoreLogic?**
No. The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for CoreLogic. The photographers showed that CoreLogic's software removed metadata when it downsampled images, but they offered no evidence that CoreLogic knew this removal would likely cause or hide infringement, so the second scienter element failed.

**Why does Stevens v. CoreLogic matter for AI training-data lawsuits?**
Many recent suits allege that AI developers stripped copyright management information from images and text used to train models. *Stevens v. CoreLogic* is the controlling Ninth Circuit authority holding that plaintiffs must plead and prove the defendant's knowledge that removal would likely induce or conceal infringement, which has become a central pleading battleground as of July 2026.

## Authorities and sources

- [Opinion PDF (Ninth Circuit), Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc., 899 F.3d 666 (9th Cir. 2018)](https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2018/06/20/16-56089.pdf)
- [Opinion record, Stevens v. CoreLogic, Inc., No. 16-56089 (govinfo, U.S. Courts Opinions)](https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCOURTS-ca9-16-56089)
- [17 U.S.C. § 1202 (integrity of copyright management information), Cornell LII](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1202)
- [Title 17, Chapter 12 (copyright protection and management systems), U.S. Copyright Office](https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap12.html)
- [Opinion PDF, Victor Elias Photography, LLC v. Ice Portal, Inc., 43 F.4th 1313 (11th Cir. 2022) (source of the "double scienter" label)](https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202111892.pdf)