Posts in Artificial Intelligence

As the administration continues its efforts to restore our patent system, lost amid all the talk about discretionary denials, injunctive relief, patent fees, etc. is patent quality. Today’s conversations about restoring the remedy of injunctive relief to strengthen our patent system are incomplete unless the other half of the patent coin is mentioned too – patent quality. Otherwise, the administration’s actions will bring us back in time to the era before the America Invents Act (AIA), in which poor quality patents were swords to extort money from operating companies.

The $1.5 billion settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, recently granted preliminary approval, is the largest copyright settlement in American legal history. That’s impressive, but more important, it shows tech companies must play by the same rules as everyone else. Tech companies regularly ask for special treatment, arguing their innovations are too important to be slowed down by existing laws. But when these companies grow big enough to affect billions of people’s lives, those early shortcuts become serious problems.

Given the recent proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) patent drafting technology, some in the legal services industry are asking whether AI is the patent profession’s “ultimate bad day,”on par with the dinosaurs’ ultimate bad day posited by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez in 1980. Like the asteroid thought to cause a mass extinction of the dinosaurs, will AI be a formidable impactor that renders patent prosecution an unprofitable practice area in law firms and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs)? Will AI decimate patent prosecution as a viable career?

Taking their cue from the recent Bartz v. Anthropic saga, the authors of a neuroscience book and professors at the State University of New York filed a class action complaint on October 9 with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple Inc. committed mass copyright infringement by using pirated books to train its artificial intelligence systems. Plaintiffs Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik claimed that Apple built its Apple Intelligence platform, including its OpenELM and Foundation Models, by making unauthorized copies of copyrighted works without permission or compensation.

Dr. Stephen Thaler has taken his fight to get works created by artificial intelligence (AI) machines recognized as copyrightable to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his petition for certiorari, filed October 9 by Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan, Thaler is asking the court to take up the question: “Whether works outputted by an AI system without a direct, traditional authorial contribution by a natural person can be copyrighted.”

In 2025, three federal courts finally confronted a question that had hovered over artificial intelligence for years: can machines legally learn from copyrighted works? Each opinion—Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, Bartz v. Anthropic, and Kadrey v. Meta Platforms—applied the four-factor fair-use test under 17 U.S.C. §107 to large-scale model training. Together, they form the first real framework for evaluating how copyright interacts with machine learning.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will launch an AI search pilot program for utility patents and will begin accepting petitions to participate in the program as of October 20, according to a draft Federal Register Notice (FRN) published today. The official notice will be published tomorrow, October 8. Petitions will be accepted through April 20, 2026, or the date that each tech center (TC) is docketed at least 200 applications accepted, whichever comes first.

Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing are being announced at a rapid pace. At the same time, we’re seeing more and more legal disputes related to these emerging and highly competitive markets. Just this month, xAI sued a former engineer alleging theft of trade secrets tied to its Grok AI platform. Meanwhile, in quantum computing, Japanese scientists cracked the longstanding ‘W state’ entanglement problem, raising new possibilities for teleportation, and making hardware IP more valuable than ever.

The recent $1.5 billion settlement between a major AI company and authors over copyright infringement represents far more than legal resolution—it marks the dawn of legitimate AI training data markets. This watershed moment signals the beginning of a necessary evolution toward market-based licensing schemes, much like how the music industry adapted to digital distribution by developing fair compensation frameworks for artists.

A number of amici have weighed in this week supporting ROSS Intelligence’s appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit challenging the originality and fair use rulings of the District of Delaware in a copyright infringement case brought by global legal information company, Thomson Reuters. ROSS’s petition for review was granted by the Third Circuit in June.

The author plaintiffs in the high-profile case against AI company, Anthropic, filed a “Supplemental Brief in Support of Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Settlement” on Monday with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing addressed outstanding issues following the Court’s initial preliminary approval hearing on September 8, including the plan of distribution.

Disney Enterprises and 11 other plaintiffs filed a complaint last week against Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) image and video generator MiniMax in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint alleged direct and secondary copyright infringement by operating a commercial AI service that “pirates and plunders Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works on a massive scale. MiniMax markets Hailuo AI as a ‘Hollywood studio in your pocket.’”

Warner Bros. Entertainment and four other plaintiffs filed their official complaint late last week against artificial intelligence (AI) image generator Midjourney, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint alleged two causes of copyright infringement of characters through its direct and secondary infringement by operating as a commercial subscription service through AI that “brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property as if it were its own.”

The Trump Administration is trying to counter China on nearly every strategic front, from the South China Sea to the factory floor. Yet the Administration, and Congress, haven’t yet done much to address one of America’s biggest vulnerabilities—the steady decline of our once world-class system of intellectual property (IP) rights.

Following a filing with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on August 27 requesting its appeal be held in abeyance, AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay what the plaintiffs are calling “the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment.” According to the “Unopposed Motion for Preliminary Approval of Class Settlement” filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, Anthropic will pay the plaintiffs, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, and MJ & KJ, Inc. and the Class “at least $1.5 billion dollars, plus interest,” amounting to about $3,000 per 500,000 works in the Class.