Posts in Artificial Intelligence

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.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we explore whether artificial intelligence (AI) technology has progressed to the point where it has already achieved consciousness. In a nutshell, the answer is our panel of technologists do not believe AI is very close to achieving consciousness, but that it is indeed possible for AI to reach the point of consciousness, and to even reach the point of self-reflection, which would pose an existential threat to humanity.

On the same day that the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) officially released part three of its study into the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on copyright law, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) announced its own 436-page report on AI and copyright. The EUIPO report was compiled by a research team of the University of Turin Law School and the Nexa Center for Internet & Society from the Polytechnic of Turin. It was based on “desk research as well as interviews from key stakeholder groups including, copyright holders, AI companies, technology solution providers as well as public organisations,” according to the EUIPO.

Late last week—one day after the Trump Administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the day before it reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter—the U.S. Copyright Office released a pre-publication edition of the third part in the agency’s series of reports exploring issues in copyright law in light of evolving artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

There’s always been a lot of confusion over whether you can patent video games. So, can you? The short answer is yes. In fact, there’s so much high tech that goes into modern video games that I couldn’t possibly fit it all into one article. I’ll still provide some examples in just a second, but first, let’s dispatch with what’s not patentable.

Dr. Stephen Thaler, who has been fighting to have his AI machines recognized as both inventors and creators on several fronts for the last few years, has petitioned for rehearing of his case in Thaler v. Perlmutter by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which in March affirmed the denial of a copyright application filed by one of Thaler’s generative AI systems.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we have a conversation that was recorded at the end of our AI 2025 program in front of a live studio audience.  Joining me were Stephanie Curcio, Clint Mehall, and John Rogitz, who make up the new IPWatchdog Advisory Committee. They have all been long-time attendees at our events, they often speak on panels, they often written articles for us, and now they will help advise me with respect to programs and continue to provide content for IPWatchdog.com. To jumpstart our conversation, I asked Stephanie, Clint and John if there was anything that they heard during our AI program that was surprising. This led into an interesting conversation about the possible existential threat presented by AI, quantum computing, data protection and trade secrets. 

This past Wednesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision affirming a district court holding that the software term “payment handler” was a “nonce” term for functional language that followed it, thereby invoking 35 U.S.C. § 112, sixth paragraph, as mean-plus-function claiming. The Federal Circuit then held that the corresponding patent specifications did not recite sufficient structure that corresponded to the claimed function, making the “payment handler” element indefinite and therefore invalidating the associated patents.

AI is increasingly becoming integral to the inventive and creative process across a wide range of industries. As Generative AI (“GenAI”) tools transform our workflows, questions at the intersection of AI and copyright are requiring a reexamination of our IP system. One set of questions is whether creative works created using AI technologies in whole or in-part are eligible for copyright protection, and if so, under what conditions. Another set of questions relates to the potential copyright infringement of GenAI due to: (1) the use of potentially copyrighted material for the training of AI models and (2) the potential infringement by the output of GenAI models on copyrighted works.

Back in 2016, I wrote an article for IPWatchdog describing invention harvesting, impediments in its way and best practices for overcoming them. Based on colleagues’ feedback, the article remains relevant for intellectual property professionals and innovators, including those starting their harvesting journey and others seeking to optimize strategies. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and related software tools can be leveraged by companies, universities, law firms and IP service providers to overcome common impediments to invention harvesting.