Posts in Artificial Intelligence

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.

On April 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s dismissal of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Recentive Analytics against Fox Corporation, holding that the asserted AI and machine learning patents were not patent eligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The decision is significant for patent attorneys and applicants in the AI space, particularly those seeking protection for inventions that incorporate machine learning (ML).

H.R.1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), passed the House on May 22, 2025. Congress.gov provides a Summary of this mammoth piece of legislation: “This bill reduces taxes, reduces or increases spending for various federal programs, increases the statutory debt limit, and otherwise addresses agencies and programs throughout the federal government. It is known as a reconciliation bill and includes legislation submitted by 11 House committees pursuant to provisions in the FY2025 congressional budget resolution (H Con. Res. 14) that directed the committees to submit legislation to the House Budget Committee that will increase or decrease the deficit and increase the statutory debt limit by specified amounts.

Public discourse over the last few months illustrates the important role IP protections play in our society. Much of this has centered on the impact of new technologies, especially those powered by AI. As new technologies enter the market, the government reacts. Before shaping reactionary IP regulation and legislation, however, lawmakers must understand both the technology and the rights it implicates. Then they must grapple with the great dilemma of IP law: how to promote innovation while still protecting earlier works. Fortunately, this process isn’t unique to AI. American IP law has adapted to numerous innovations over the years and can do so again now.

In the inaugural episode of IP Innovators, Steve Brachmann sits down with Paul Hunter, Partner and Electronics Practice Co-Chair at Foley & Lardner, to explore nearly three decades of transformation in IP law—from the analog era of faxes and dictaphones to the cutting-edge use of AI in patent prosecution today.

The union that represents U.S. actors, journalists and other artists has filed an Unfair Labor Practices complaint against the production company for the popular interactive video game, Fortnite. The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), filed the complaint against Llama Productions, which is wholly owned by Epic Games, Inc., charging that the game’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) to recreate the voice of deceased actor James Earl Jones as Darth Vader violated Section 8(a), subsections (1) and (5) of the National Labor Relations Act.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Allison Gaul who serves as legal counsel for Boston Consulting Group. We begin our conversation with me asking about what she believes are the biggest legal issues in the IP world today. Gaul did identify several things that stay top of mind for her, with various issues relating to data front and center as the top issue. The second area identified by Gaul was open source, and how many of the AI companies promoting “open source” are really not truly open source because often the model, weights and/or training data are not made available, which makes it seem like these companies are racing to gain market share and ultimately “doing a little bit of a switcheroo.” The third and final thing that Gaul identifies as being constantly top of mind is the overall speed of AI development.