Lipton, Weinberger & Husick

06/02/2026

Ask Dr. Copyright® About Taylor Swift's Voice

Dear Doc:

I could swear that I have seen Taylor Swift in videos on the Internet saying that she loves some product or other, or endorsing a hotel. Please tell me that my favorite singer (and top 30 songwriter) is not so crass.

Signed,
Swifty LaCzar

Dear Swifty:

Yes, TayTay is not that crass, but lots of Internet scammers are! They are using her voice and her likeness, and AI tools to create “deepfakes” to try to profit from her reputation. But we can be fearless, because intellectual property law is coming to the rescue!

Ms. Swift recently filed two “sensory mark” trademark applications for audio clips and one image of ‌herself to use in going after the fakers. In one of the audio clips, she says: "Hey, it's Taylor Swift, and you can listen to my new album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ on demand on Amazon Music Unlimited.” The second clip says: "Hey, it’s Taylor. My brand new album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is out on October 3 and you can click to pre-save it so you can listen to it on Spotify.” She also filed an image showing her onstage in a sequined outfit, pink guitar in hand.

There are state 'Right of Publicity' laws that offer limited protection against unauthorized use of a famous individual’s likeness. Trademark filings, however, may represent another kind of legal weapon. Registering a celebrity's recorded voice is a new kind of trademark registration that has not yet been tested in court. When used along side copyrights, this trademark may provide a tool to go after the deepfakes.

As the Doc has often pointed out, trademarks protect the public against confusion as to the source or origin of goods and services. By registering her own voice, Ms. Swift will be able to claim that deepfakes mislead the consumer into believing that whatever the deepfake is selling originates with, or is endorsed by her. Under trademark law, the statute of limitations, standards of proof, and damages are very different from those under copyright law, and this will likely make any lawsuit that she files much more powerful.

Is your voice or image an important asset to you? Speak now to the attorneys at LW&H who may help you file your own “sensory mark” trademark applications. You never know when someone will deepfake you!

Until next month,
The “Doc”

04/30/2026

Ask Dr. Copyright® About the ADA

Dear Doc:
The design of websites has become very complex, and web pages are now essential to the way companies do business. I have heard that websites are required to be accessible to people with disabilities. What does that mean?
Signed,
Honestly Accommodating

Dear HA:

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) public-facing websites of businesses (and state/local governments) must be accessible to people with disabilities, which in practice means meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Level AA (currently 2.1/2.2) or providing equally effective access by other means. Failure to do so can lead to Department of Justice enforcement, private lawsuits (including class actions), injunctive orders to remediate, and substantial civil penalties and legal costs, plus reputational damage.

Title III of the ADA requires that retailers, restaurants, hotels, professional offices, and other “public accommodations” must ensure that the goods and services offered on their websites are accessible to people with disabilities. Although web sites themselves are not specifically mentioned in the Act, courts have ruled that they must meet the ADA standards.

In brief, the requirements include that each website must feature “perceivable content” such as alt text for images and other non-textual information, captions for video and audio content, and sufficient contrast and resizable text to allow reading by the visually impaired. The site must also have an “operable interface” which means that it may be used, if desired, with only a keyboard (no mouse, trackpad, etc.). Flashing content (that could trigger a seizure) must be absent, and all information presented must be “understandable”, meaning that titles, headings, and links must be clear and unambiguous as to their actions. Finally, the code of the site must not interfere with the use of assistive technologies and must function compatibly across browsers and devices.

The Doc knows that all of this is a bit dense for small companies that just want a basic web page. But just imagine how much effort is required if you’re a gigantic site such as Amazon! (There is also an equivalent to the ADA in Europe: the European Accessibility Act and it is even more complicated.

So what’s a business owner to do, you ask?

A practical path to full ADA compliance includes:

• Conducting an accessibility audit using both automated tools and manual testing (including keyboard-only and screen-reader testing);

• Prioritizing fixes that remove barriers (e.g., non‑keyboard‑accessible menus, unlabeled form fields, missing alt text on critical images, and inaccessible PDFs);

• Building accessibility requirements into contracts with web developers;

• Establishing a public accessibility statement on the website, with a contact method and a defined process to respond promptly to accessibility requests.

Like many regulations, the most important thing to do is become educated, and then to take action. Reading this, you’ve taken the first step. Now make a plan. Is your site already accessible? How do you know? Use some of the testing tools linked above. Talk to your developers. Moving in the right direction is the key to avoiding enforcement actions and lawsuits.

Have a legal question about technology issues? Contact the attorneys at LW&H. They “get” this techie stuff.

Until next month,

The “Doc”

Send a message to learn more

03/31/2026

Ask Dr. Copyright® About IP Rights

Dear Doc:
Talk about whiplash! First, I read that Cox Communications (a major cable TV company and internet service provider (ISP)) got hit with a jury verdict of (best Doctor Evil impression here) ONE BILLION DOLLARS for copyright infringement committed by its subscribers. Then, just this week, I heard that the Supreme Court REVERSED that award, so Cox gets to walk away. Doc, what gives? Has the Supreme Court LOST ITS MOTHER-LOVING MIND???
Signed,
Dased & Confuzed

Dear D&C:

Let’s leave psychoanalysis of the Highest Court in the Land to the professionals (and by that, the Doc means the diverse hosts over at Fox “Everybody knows that we are just entertainment” “News”.)

On March 25, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed the Fourth Circuit’s judgment upholding contributory copyright liability in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, and remanded the case, in which a jury had awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. The Court held that an internet service provider (ISP) is not contributorily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement merely because it continued to provide service to IP addresses associated with known infringement.

Background
Cox serves abut six million internet subscribers. Sony Music and other major music copyright owners used a surveillance company, MarkMonitor, to track copyright violations down to particular IP addresses. Over a two-year period, MarkMonitor sent Cox over 163,000 notices identifying IP addresses associated with copying. Cox employed a “graduated” response system, first sending warnings, then, if copying continued, suspending service for a time, and finally for repeat offenders, terminating service. Sony told the Court that Cox terminated only thirty-two subscribers for copyright infringement during the two year period.

The jury found for Sony on both “contributory” and “vicarious liability” theories, found Cox’s infringement willful, and awarded $1 billion in statutory damages. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judgment on contributory liability but reversed on vicarious liability, finding no direct financial benefit to Cox from the infringement, and it vacated the damages award for reassessment.

The Supreme Court Opinion
Justice Thomas, writing for a rare seven-Justice majority (with the other two justices even more rarely concurring in the judgment), held that contributory copyright liability requires proof that the provider intended its service to be used for infringement, which can be established in only two ways: (1) if the provider induced infringement through specific acts, or (2) if the service was tailored to infringement, meaning it is not capable of substantial or commercially significant noninfringing uses.

The Court found that Cox, “repeatedly discouraged copyright infringement by sending warnings, suspending services, and terminating accounts,” and its service “simply provided Internet access, which is used for many purposes other than copyright infringement.”

Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Jackson, concurred in the judgment but criticized the majority for “unnecessarily limit[ing] secondary liability.” Justice Sotomayor concurred because Cox lacked specific knowledge of who committed the infringement—it knew only which IP address was involved. In other words, it knew the address of the subscriber, but not the identity of the person using the service to copy songs—and that “informational gap” was “fatal” to the requisite intent showing. She cautioned, that by requiring independent volitional conduct such as either inducing infringement or providing an infringement-only tool, the majority’s framework arguably risks rendering the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s “repeat infringer policy” requirements a dead letter, since an ISP would have little incentive to police repeat infringers when mere knowledge of their activity no longer triggers contributory liability.

What It All Means
This decision significantly limits knowledge-based contributory liability theories of contributory liability; copyright owners will now need to show either (i) active inducement by the ISP (such as providing instructions on how to copy) or (ii) a service specifically tailored for infringement that has no legitimate other uses. The Doc cautions that it’s still absolutely illegal and wrong to pirate music, movies and other intellectual property over the Internet. Nothing in this case changes that. For giant corporations that run the Internet, however, its nothing but good news from the Court - they effectively profit from allowing copying to continue. IP rights owners now need to track down the person in the house who’s doing the copying and that is effectively impossible.

Do you have a question about intellectual property rights? Contact the attorneys at LW&H. They keep up with the latest decisions, opinions, and just plain hallucinations from across the Internet (and remember, according to the late US Senator Ted Stephens (R-AK) “The Internet is not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.”

Until next month,

The “Doc”

02/27/2026

Ask Dr. Copyright® About Registered Patent Lawyers

Dear Doc:
I know that in addition to knowing everything about copyrights, you’re also a “registered patent attorney”. What, exactly, does that mean, and how does that compare to being an “intellectual property attorney”?
Signed,
Legally Confused

Dear LC:

In American law, there are only two recognized specialties that an attorney-at-law may advertise. These are “proctor in admiralty” and “registered patent attorney”. While the admiralty has its own interesting history that the Doc needs not explain here, the registered patent attorney is a license conferred by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that permits a lawyer who is a member of the bar of the highest court of a state or territory to also represent clients in proceedings before the USPTO such as in filing of patent applications and appeals before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. There are now 38,200 registered patent attorneys in the United States (out of 1.37 million total lawyers!).

In order to become registered, an attorney must possess several qualifications. The first is that the applicant must meet certain technical and scientific knowledge requirements. Per the General Requirements Bulletin under 37 C.F.R. § 11.7, she must meet the standards under one of the following:

Category A: Bachelor’s, master’s, or PhD in an approved science/engineering field (e.g., various engineering disciplines, chemistry, biology, physics, computer science under certain conditions).

Category B: Sufficient semester hours of specified science/engineering coursework, even if the degree title is different (e.g., 24+ hours physics, or a combination of chemistry/physics plus biology-related credits meeting detailed rules).

Category C: Passing the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam plus a bachelor’s degree, demonstrating practical engineering or scientific experience.

The attorney must be a U.S. citizen (or have the requisite immigration status), and be a member in good standing of the bar of a state or territory. That usually, but not always, means that she graduated from an approved law school with a juris doctor, took and passed the bar exam, and meets the criteria for good character required by the state.

Then the attorney must apply to the USPTO Office of Enrollment and Discipline (sounds kinky, but is not, the Doc assures you, dear readers). If approved, the attorney then must take an examination that is colloquially called the “Agent’s Exam” or “Patent Bar Exam.” Finally, after passing the exam, and paying the necessary fees, the attorney must take an oath prescribed under 37 C.F.R. § 11.8.

You probably noticed that all of this says nothing about trying cases in federal court. That’s because you do not need to be a registered patent attorney to do that. In fact, relatively few lawyers who try cases are also registered patent attorneys. The Doc believes, however, that it is preferable when an attorney both drafts, files, and prosecutes applications before the USPTO, and tries infringement cases in federal court. That is what the Doc does, and he tells clients that it is useful to know both how the patent examiner will view a patent claim, as well as how judges and juries are likely to rule on them. That is because there are different legal standards that apply in the USPTO and in courts.

Finally, many attorneys who are not registered patent attorneys call themselves “intellectual property attorneys.” These lawyers deal with trademarks, copyrights, agreements concerning patents (licenses) and often, patent litigation, but they may not represent clients in the Patent Office itself.

So now you know. Most, but not all of the attorneys at LW&H are registered patent attorneys. (And even the one who is not knows a great deal about patents!) Give them a call with your questions.

Until next month,

The “Doc”

Send a message to learn more

01/31/2026

Ask Dr. Copyright® About Pirates

Dear Doc:
I know that this question is a bit out of your bailiwick (you DO have a bailiwick, don’t you?) but given your legal background and knowledge of sailing, I hope that you may be able to help. Are pirates sailing against cartels that ship drugs into the United States? How is that possibly legal?
Signed,
Long John Gold (neé Silver)

Dear John:

The Doc has researched this question from stem to stern, and has now gotten to the bottom of this matter. The United States Constitution provides in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, that Congress shall have the power to, “to declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”. In the 18th Century, Letters of Marque and Reprisal were granted by governments to authorize private persons to take action against enemy ships in time of war. They established a bounty-hunting system and some of history’s most infamous pirates were actually not outlaws, but were operating entirely legally under these instruments. By the time of the U.S. Civil War, privateering had been abolished by the United States’ declaration that it would abide by what became one of the the first multilateral treaties, the Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law.

Fast forward to 2025, and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and a couple of Republican members of the House have introduced the “Cartel Marque and Reprisal Authorization Act of 2025.” This bill, if passed by the Congress and signed by the President, would create a new group of pirates, “privately armed and equipped persons and entities” with the power to, “seize outside the geographic boundaries of the United States and its territories the person and property of any individual who the President determines is a member of a cartel, a member of a cartel-linked organization, or a conspirator associated with a cartel or a cartel-linked organization.” In effect, this bill would give a bass-boat militia carte blanche to attack anyone on land or sea that the President, in his sole discretion, thinks is part of a cartel or working with one.

The Doc does not know whether part of this arrangement requires the newly-minted pirates to fly the Jolly Roger, wear eye patches, or have parrots. So what does this have to do with intellectual property law? Absolutely nothing, except that Senator Lee serves on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary which has authority over patents, copyrights and trademarks. He sits on the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property. Senator Lee has not sponsored a single bill dealing with problems in our intellectual property system. He has sponsored bills to prevent citizens from enforcing the Clean Air Act, to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from enforcing regulations, and to withdraw the United States from NATO in the event that NATO votes to admit Ukraine (the Doc thinks that a cosponsor of that last one may be a guy named Putin!)

So are you a fan of pirates? Do you wait with bated breath for Talk Like a Pirate Day each September? Arrrrgh ye excited ta be on board an actual pirate ship? Well, before ye embarque, give a call to the attorneys at LW&H. They may have some advice for ye!

Until next month,
The “Doc”

Send a message to learn more

12/31/2025

Ask Dr. Copyright® About AI
Dear Doc,
Many questions about artificial intelligence (AI) remain up in the air as judges try to keep up with technology that is developing faster than the speed of light. It seems to me that many of the issues might be solved if we just kept the AI companies from putting copies of other peoples’ materials in the AI models that they build. Can’t we just do that?



Signed,

Every Author, Photographer, Artist, Musician, etc.

Dear Every:

That’s a great thought, and it’s central to a question recently addressed by the High Court of Justice of England and Wales in the case of Getty Images v. Stabiility-AI. In a 201 page opinion, Mrs. Justice Joanna Smith, DBE, addressed a complicated case in which Getty Images, which owns a database containing over 477 million photographs and other images, charged Stability-AI with copyright infringement. Stability-AI markets a visual artificial intelligence program called “Stable Diffusion” that used Getty’s images to “train” Stable Diffusion to reproduce nearly identical images from the Getty database when prompted to do so.

As Justice Smith explained,

Stable Diffusion is a type of generative AI model known as a diffusion model, or more specifically a latent diffusion model. Broadly, it transforms an input (a user command or “prompt” in the form of written text or a “seed” image) into a desired output in the form of a synthesized image by modeling a probability distribution based on its training data and then sampling from that distribution. The development of a stochastic model of this type typically involves designing and building the architecture for the model which is then trained by repeated exposure to massive quantities of data, in this case in the form of human generated digital images contained in datasets created by crawling and scraping images and associated descriptive captions from the Internet.

The model parameters (the “model weights” or “biases”) define the network connections in the model and are learnable parameters controlling the functionality of the network. Before training begins, the network’s weights are initialized with random values. As the network is exposed to the training data, the weights are iteratively updated to better satisfy an optimization criterion specified by engineers. Once the model is trained, running the network, referred to as inference, is (in simple terms) an input-output system in which the user specifies inputs, the trained network performs computations on those inputs and then generates the desired output.”
(Opinion, p.1)
The central question that the case addressed was whether the trained model contained copies of the images used in training, and was thus an infringement of copyright.

The Court explained at great length about the processes used in training. This included that compression of digital images, the introduction of random noise into each compressed image, and the care taken not to “over expose” the model or to permit simple memorization by the model. There were other issues brought to the Court, including a charge that use of Stable Diffusion was capable of producing images that contained trademarks owned by Getty (which were used as “digital watermarks” on the images that were part of the training data. The Court agreed that this was possible, but held that there was no way to know how many images had been generated that contained the trademarks.

In the end, the Court concluded, “[A]n AI model such as Stable Diffusion which does not store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so) [and thus,] is not an “infringing copy”.

The Doc has no doubt that this is not the last we have heard of this issue, as AI models continue to devour all types of information. The Doc is amazed by what today’s AI systems can do that is undeniably useful, but he still believes that people should be taught research and critical thinking skills that do not depend on AI before they use these new digital assistants. Stay tuned here for more updates. (This was not written using AI in any manner, though the Doc did recently give a long lecture about how AI was changing the field of law, for which he used several AI tools to create his Keynote slide deck!)

Have a question about intellectual property law? Give the attorneys at LW&H a call or an email. They keep up to date on this stuff (and have their own Ai models to prove it!)

Until next month,

The “Doc”

Using Stable Diffusion, prompted with “Generate a portrait of an attorney who is known as "Doctor Copyright" in the style of Rembrandt”

11/28/2025

Ask Dr. Copyright® About Robots

Dear Doc:

I saw the humanoid robot that Russia developed when it tried to walk across the stage and fell flat on its face. I’ve also seen that Tesla is developing a humanoid robot, and I’ve been amazed by the acrobatic stunts of the robot dogs from Boston Scientific. Now I have heard FigureAI, a Silicon Valley company, is building a humanoid robot, but that in the philosophy of the Valley to “move fast and break things” has fired its Principal Robotic Safety Engineer who now says that the company has almost no safeguards and that its robot has injured human workers. Driverless taxi cabs daily face a real-life version of the Trolly Problem. What gives?
Signed,
Will Robinson

Dear Will:

Many years ago, Isaac Asimov coined the “Three Laws of Robotics” which he said were printed in the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.” The laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These are not necessarily laws in the sense of having been enacted by a legislature. They are more general philosophical principles, but they seem to make sense as a guide for how we should expect autonomous robots to work with humans. Other writers have expanded on these laws, or have adapted them to more real world situations, but there remain ambiguous instances and paradoxical examples (which are also common to the laws that legislatures enact…we often call these “loopholes” and lawyers spend lots of time and effort finding and exploiting them.)

A law suit filed by Robert Gruendel, the engineer fired by FigureAI alleges that the company is developing a robot without any real safeguards at all. It is axiomatic that the only way a robot could obey Asimov’s laws, or protect against harming people is for the manufacturer to program it to do so, and we should expect that the software that runs the robot should encode these protections. Mr. Gruendel’s law suit may allow a court to examine the issue for the first time.

Predictably, the companies building robots are patenting aspects of their software, and are registering copyrights, and asserting that their systems are trade secrets. Legislation to provide safeguards is far away, because our elected officials know very little about the subject, and corporations do not want any interference in their products or plans. The whole issue is also being eclipsed by controversy over artificial intelligence in general.

So Will, the Doc feels that it may be too late to warn you of the DANGER. We are already seeing many robots that scurry around like Star Wars “droids”, and will soon meet humanoid robots in our own lives. How they will treat us depends on their corporate creators. The Supreme Court has held that corporations are people. Citizens United v. FEC. The Doc is frightened.

Have a technology question that needs a legal perspective? Give the attorneys at LW&H a call. They understand the intersection of law and tech,

Until next month,

The “Doc”

Send a message to learn more

08/29/2025

Ask Dr. Copyright® About Taylor Swift

Dear Doc:
I’m THRILLED that TayVis is/are engaged. But my question is about how Taylor protected the name of her latest album legally before she announced it on the podcast. Can you clue a fan in?
Signed,
A Devoted Swiftie

Dear ADS:

As you referenced, Taylor Swift announced the name of her new album, “The Life of a Showgirl”™ on her now-fiancee’s podcast. Certainly, she wanted to keep the title of the album (and presumably the song of the same name) secret until the announcement, but also needed legal protection against the inevitable copycats and pirates.

It turns out (with a bit of snooping), that the day before the announcement, TAS Rights Management, LLC filed a federal trademark application at the US Patent and Trade Mark Office (USPTO) for the mark THE LIFE OF A SHOWGIRL for a wide range of goods and services related to entertainment, music and merchandise. The description of the goods and services to which this mark will be applied is vast (too large to reproduce here!)

Taylor, as you might expect, timed her filing perfectly…not too early to spill the beans, and not too late to permit the pirates to sneak in applications ahead of her announcement. This is one strategy for trademark owners. Under the Paris Convention, Taylor will have six months to file the same trademark, for the same goods and services, in any Paris Convention country, and claim the benefit of her US filing date. This puts her far ahead of the queue in relation to any copycat applicants.

Another common strategy is to file for registration under a newly-created entity such as an LLC with a name that is not connected to the identity of the owner, to avoid detection by the copycats. Technology companies do this all the time. They also use code names for their projects to stay “off the radar”. There is a famous story about Apple developing a new computer under the code name “Carl Sagan”. When that name leaked to the press, the actual scientist of that name objected, and had his lawyers write a “cease and desist letter” to Apple, which promptly changed the code name of the new Power Macintosh 7100 computer to “BHA”. (The Doc suggests that you search for what that means on your favorite Internet search site.) See our article on "Submarine" trademarks.

One important note: Taylor didn’t need a trademark registration application before commencing use of her mark; she just needed to determine that the mark was free to use. She would have had her attorneys do a search (very quietly) under a nondisclosure agreement with a search firm. That search would have been done in increments, because trademarks are territorial and each country has its own registration database. Any confusingly similar marks that turned up would then be evaluated by counsel to determine the risk that they presented to Taylor’s new mark.

Do you have an album about to “drop”? A new product with a cool name? Contact the attorneys at LW&H before you’re ready to go to market. They can help you to avoid the pirates and file your application when you “ARRRR” ready to go.

Until next month,

The “Doc

Send a message to learn more

07/31/2025

Ask Dr. Copyright® About AI

Dear Doc:
I hear that using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence systems is legal. Can that be true?

Signed,
Every Artist, Ever

Dear EAE:

Training artificial intelligence (AI) systems, particularly large language models (LLMs) is a process that relies on vast amounts of information that is broken down and statistically analyzed. Regardless of whether that information is text in some language such as books, web pages, or computer code, or audio such as music or recorded speech or birdsong, or graphical information such as digitized photographs, artworks, or surveillance camera feeds, it will be broken down into a sequence of “tokens” and that sequence will be the basis for responses to questions (called “prompts”) presented to the AI. Part of the material used in this process is subject to copyright, and the owners of the copyright have brought various law suits against the companies developing the AI systems, claiming that this process is an infringement of the rights of the authors and copyright holders.

One response of the AI companies is to explain that although the training process uses a computer and makes a form of a copy of the materials used in training, they say it's like telling a child to learn how to write well by reading many well-written books. They also claim that their use of the copyrighted works is “transformative” because the result is a statistical database (the “AI Model”) that contains information about the training data, but is not a copy of that data. Finally, the AI builders have responded to the lawsuits by claiming that their use of copyrighted materials is “fair use” under United States Copyright Law, and is therefore not an infringement at all.

On May 9, 2025, the United States Copyright Office released a 108-page report on whether the use of copyrighted materials to train AI systems is defensible as a fair use. The view of the Copyright Office is that such uses cannot be defended as fair use. One recent court decision also took this position. The case of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, 765 F. Supp. 3d 382 held recently that fair use does not apply to AI training, and that case is on appeal to the Third Circuit.

Two more recent court decisions granting summary judgment have sided with the AI companies, and against the authors, declaring that, in the view of at least two federal judges, the use of copyrighted materials in AI training is fair use. In Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, Judge Alsup ruled, “In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative.” In Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc., Judge Chhabria ruled that in the absence of meaningful evidence of market dilution from the authors, the copying and training by Meta to train its AI were fair use.

Both cases will continue, as in each there were other issues not ruled on by the courts. But these cases mark a significant victory for AI companies in what materials they may use in training. Still, many other high-profile cases making similar claims are moving through the courts.

Are you training an AI model? Are you artificially intelligent? The lawyers at LW&H are genuinely intelligent about these and other intellectual property legal issues. Give them a shout.

Until next month,

The “Doc

Send a message to learn more