Posts in Artificial Intelligence

I have spent my career around artists: booking them, interviewing them, publishing their stories and watching how this business treats the people who make it run. Right now the most valuable thing many of those artists own is not a catalog. It is their voice. And in the United States, how well that voice is protected still depends on where you happen to be standing. That has to change. Congress should pass one federal voice-and-likeness right, and it should do it now.

The American Apparel & Footwear Association (AAFA) submitted comments to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on October 7, recommending that USTR include Facebook, Instagram, Alibaba.com, AliExpress, and DHgate in its 2026 Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy (NML) report. While Alibaba and DHgate platforms have been included on the list before, Facebook and Instagram have “avoided accountability” so far, according to the letter. 

I am pleased to introduce “Postcard from WIPO,” a new occasional series for the U.S. intellectual property community. Having spent much of my career working on IP issues in the United States, including as Deputy Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), I know how important it is to understand what is happening in the international IP system. From Geneva, I now have a different vantage point on that work, and I would like to share it with you.

One possible framework for protecting trade secrets while regulating AI is an International AI Assurance and Access Compact, organized around “verifiable reciprocity.” Participating jurisdictions would recognize defined compliance findings in exchange for comparable verification obligations, alongside commitments to fund regulatory capacity. This is a proposed arrangement, not existing law. Its consequences for intellectual property (IP) turn on what evidence travels across borders and what rights remain unaffected.

Today, the U.S. Copyright Office published a notice of inquiry (NOI) in the Federal Register soliciting public comment on issues related to music piracy threatening billions in U.S. domestic revenues generated by digital streaming. The Office’s NOI responds to a request into the prevalence of streaming fraud across the music industry issued by U.S. Representative Scott Fitzgerald (R-WI), who also voiced concerns about generative artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on the music industry.

In economic theory, corporate value creation can be attributed to many factors and conflicting preferences. Prioritizing different factors produces a set of different outcomes and the outcome that is seemingly most efficient becomes the accepted norm. Sometimes however, corporate actors rely on accepted business practices which, while taken in the pursuit of the most optimal outcome, facilitate market distortions. Hit by a compute-driven demand shock and faced with resource scarcity, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have opted to allocate production capacity in a way that has exacerbated an industry- wide memory card supply shortage. But to fully understand why the price of hardware components and consumer electronic devices has been steadily surging, we must first start with Nvidia.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling under seal affirming the District of Delaware’s grant of partial summary judgment to Canadian technology company Thomson Reuters on its claims that legal artificial intelligence (AI) company ROSS Intelligence infringed upon more than 2,000 copyrighted headnote summaries of U.S. case law from its Westlaw legal research platform.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires faced the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property Tuesday in an oversight hearing pushing for more information on several of the policy changes his administration has put in place. The hearing was the last over which its current Chairman, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), will preside.

Using one associate to prepare a claim construction chart and a second to check it is ordinary practice. In In re Brian E. Mitchell, Proceeding No. D2026-16, a patent attorney did the same with two generative AI tools: one to draft proposed claim constructions and a second to review them. Erroneous citations still reached the district court, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) publicly reprimanded him for that.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is considering whether to impose new requirements on social-media companies, search engines and other online platforms whose advertising systems help impersonation scams reach consumers. In a September 24 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM), the FTC requested information about platforms’ ad-optimization tools, financial incentives and efforts to prevent fraudulent advertisers from impersonating government agencies and legitimate businesses.

Recent discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice tend to split into two opposing positions. One holds that junior attorneys should not meaningfully use AI because it will interfere with their development and prevent the formation of sound legal judgment. The other holds that AI will replace junior attorneys by eliminating the tasks they traditionally performed. Both positions rest on the same hidden assumption, which is that AI carries a direction of its own and that the profession’s task is to decide whether to accept it or resist it.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Steve Caltrider, Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and a former General Patent Counsel at Eli Lilly. The discussion also examined patent quality and the role of examination. Caltrider’s view is that the best time to establish confidence in a patent is when the USPTO examines it—not years later through PTAB review or district court litigation, after investment decisions have already been made. He recognized the need for an error-correction mechanism, while cautioning that review should not become so extensive or unpredictable that it undermines the value of issued patents.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I spoke with Hilary Preston. Our conversation focused on the rapidly expanding AI data center ecosystem and the technology, infrastructure, and intellectual property risks emerging as billions of dollars flow into the sector.

Under 35 U.S.C. Section 256, one can only correct an inventorship error when the underlying facts and the affected parties can actually be identified, and when the statutory correction procedure can be completed. AI-assisted invention is starting to produce cases where none of that is possible: the development record shows plenty of human activity, but nothing in it establishes which person actually conceived the claimed invention. After Fortress Iron, LP v. Digger Specialties, Inc., No. 2024-2313 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 2, 2026, that kind of gap can turn into a validity problem, not just a paperwork one.