Posts in Artificial Intelligence

The Trump Administration on Wednesday released a plan for keeping the United States competitive in the race to number one with respect to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Titled “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” the key policies would remove many of the restrictions on AI companies proposed by the Biden Administration’s AI plan, which was scrapped soon after Trump took office.

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Monday, July 21, introduced the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which would chiefly bar artificial intelligence (AI) companies from using copyrighted works to train their generative AI tools without authors’ permission. The bill was announced less than a week after Hawley held a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism in which he called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history.”

On Wednesday, July 16, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training.” Subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history” and rejected the suggestion that the courts should determine the path forward.

Today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it was launching a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool for design patent examiners. DesignVision, a centralized tool for querying multiple industrial design data sources, is the latest move in the USPTO’s overall effort to address the patent examination backlog, which has involved both the introduction of AI-powered examination tools like DesignVision and the streamlining of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) activities through evolving standards for discretionary denials.

Following a June order of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on fair use in a case brought against generative AI tool Anthropic by a group of authors, Anthropic has now requested permission to file an interlocutory appeal. The underlying lawsuit was filed by journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024 against Anthropic on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” The suit challenged only the inputs of the LLMs, not the outputs.

Thirty-one artists from across Europe posted videos today urging the EU Commission to “Stay True to the [AI] Act.” The slogan is part of a campaign that criticizes the EU’s implementation of the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, which the campaign’s website says “should protect artists” but that the EU is instead “watering down the legislation – failing to hold AI companies to account.”

The European Commission on Thursday published “The General-Purpose AI Code of Practice,” which is meant to complement the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act approved last year. The Code was developed by 13 independent experts across four working groups and with input from over 1,000 stakeholders, according to the European Commission. The EU AI Act came into force on August 1, 2024, with most provisions of the regulation applying as of August 2, 2026. However, the regulation said that compliance for prohibited practices were to be in effect by February 2, 2025, considering “the unacceptable risk associated with the use of AI in certain ways.”

As the U.S. Senate disbanded from its 24-hour “vote-a-rama” debating amendments to President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” earlier today, one major provision that would have impacted the regulation of artificial intelligence has been scrapped. The AI modernization provision of the original version of the bill would have banned state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years if they wanted access to funds aimed at improving AI infrastructure. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) initially joined a compromise amendment with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have narrowed the scope of the provision and lowered the moratorium to five years, but later withdrew her support for that amendment and introduced her proposal to strike the provision in its entirety along with Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), which passed by a vote of 99-1.

Last week, a coalition of entertainment companies filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, an AI company that builds generative tools using publicly available data. These lawsuits follow similar actions against other leading AI firms. The strategy is clear: ensnare AI startups under an avalanche of litigation before they can challenge entrenched business models. If established media wins this battle, it won’t just hurt AI companies—it will harm the millions of American businesses and consumers who stand to benefit from the most transformative technology since the internet itself.

Yesterday the U.S. District Court for the Northern of District of California ruled that a number of well-known authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, failed to successfully argue that the market for their works was significantly harmed by Meta’s use of the works to train its generative AI tool, Llama….. In a 40-page summary judgment ruling issued just two days after another landmark decision on whether AI inputs infringe copyright, Judge Vince Chhabria said that the copying of works for training large language models (LLMs) will usually be found to be infringing, but that in this case the plaintiffs’ arguments missed the mark.

The advent of generative AI brings to the forefront many novel and complex legal questions related to fair use and copyright infringement. Historically, assessing whether a particular use qualifies as fair use has been analyzed through an established economic framework. Applying the same methodology to copyright matters involving generative AI, however, presents unique challenges—primarily due to the distinct nature of the AI-generated content and the processes involved.  

On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a mixed  order on fair use as it relates to generative AI, in part likening the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the process of human learning, in a case brought against generative AI tool Anthropic by a group of authors. The lawsuit was filed by journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024 against Anthropic on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” The suit challenged only the inputs of the LLMs, not the outputs.

In a moment that was both inevitable and seismic, Disney and Universal filed a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit against Midjourney, a leading generative AI company specializing in image and video synthesis. The studios claim that Midjourney trained its generative models on copyrighted characters, including Yoda, Bart Simpson, Iron Man, Shrek, and others, without authorization, and facilitated public generation of derivative works through its platform.

On Wednesday, predictive analytics firm Recentive filed a combined petition  for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit challenging that court’s invalidation of Recentive’s machine learning patent claims this April. As Recentive argues, the Federal Circuit’s decision to eliminate all patent protection for novel machine learning applications using established models conflicts with the U.S. Supreme Court’s patent-eligibility standard under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and chills U.S. innovation an incredibly important area of emerging technology.

Disney Enterprises, Inc. et. al. and Universal City Studios Productions LLLP, et. al. filed a complaint today with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against the AI image generator, Midjourney. The suit accuses Midjourney of being a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” According to the plaintiffs, Midjourney could have stopped the infringement and copying of their copyrighted works at any time—either by controlling the data used to train, by controlling the prompts users input, or via technological protection measures—but chose not to and failed to respond to letters informing them of the infringement prior to the lawsuit.