Posts in Copyright

Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving faster than traditional intellectual property (IP) strategy was designed to handle. The issue is not simply speed, although speed is certainly part of the problem. The deeper challenge is that AI innovation does not fit neatly into the legacy IP operating model. The assets, development cycles, regulatory environment, and commercial pathways are all different. And the value drivers are increasingly distributed across a spectrum of AI-related intangible domains, which include patents, trade secrets, data rights, software architecture, licensing models, and customer contracts.

On April 30, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released this year’s Special 301 Report, which surveys the effectiveness of intellectual property (IP) rights and enforcement abroad and identifies foreign nations where IP protections are uncertain or disregarded. The 2026 report marks the first time in 13 years that a Priority Foreign Country (PFC) has been named, with Vietnam being identified as a PFC for persistent failures to address several long-standing IP concerns. The USTR has also added the European Union (EU) to the Special 301 Report’s Watch List, the first time since 2006 that the continental government has been identified for IP-related concerns in addition to individual European nations.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established World IP Day to commemorate April 26, 1970, the date the WIPO Convention officially took effect. Each year, the occasion serves as a global reminder of the role that intellectual property plays in encouraging innovation and creativity. This year, the World IP Day theme is “IP and Sports Ready, Set, Innovate,” recognizing the increasingly complex relationship between intellectual property rights and the multibillion-dollar global sports industry.

Today, the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) published the third edition of its Congressional Innovation Scorecard, which provides a measure of each lawmaker in the U.S. Congress in terms of their impact on the nation’s intellectual property (IP) system. Although this year’s scorecard acknowledges higher numbers of pro-copyright bills introduced into Congress, it concludes that members of Congress are still failing to engage fully and effectively on national IP issues to the detriment of America’s future as an innovation leader.

While artificial intelligence (AI) companies have long maintained that copyright law poses a significant barrier to innovation, it’s getting harder for them to make that argument with a straight face. It was one thing to claim that early text-based chatbots were magical boxes that didn’t really depend on the copyrighted works used to train them—a pretense that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. But it’s quite another to make such claims when their systems are spitting out nearly perfect audiovisual renditions of Disney’s copyrighted characters, including Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Darth Vader from Star Wars, and Elsa from Frozen. That’s what Midjourney was doing when Disney sued it for infringement, and it’s also what OpenAI was doing when it struck a licensing deal with Disney.

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted certiorari to a petition brought by internet service provider (ISP) Grande Communications Networks LLC, appealing from a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that upheld a jury verdict holding Grande Communications liable for contributory infringement against a group of major U.S. record labels. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and then vacated the judgment and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration under the Court’s recent opinion in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment.

Opponents of the “Pro Codes Act” are speaking out this week following its recent reintroduction in the U.S. Senate. The Protecting and Enhancing Public Access to Codes (Pro Codes) Act of 2026, S. 4145, was reintroduced on March 19 by Senators Jon Cornyn, Chris Coons, Mazie Hirono, and Thom Tillis. According to the bill’s sponsors, the legislation “ensures safety standards do not lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law by name so long as they are accessible for free on a publicly available website.”

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruling that internet service provider Cox Communications, Inc., is not contributorily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement. In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Thomas, the Court held that a service provider is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only when it intended for its service to be used in that way, which is established only if the provider either encouraged the infringement or designed the service specifically to facilitate it.

Although I am not an attorney, I have been deeply enmeshed in the patent process as an inventor for three decades. And I have grown an appreciation for your profession that is perhaps deeper than most folks’. The majority of my work over the past 30 years has been in AI and machine learning. And I want to share some thoughts with you today about how all of this intersects and how you, everyone in this room, are really the last line of defense that humanity has in maintaining what it means to be human. 

Spurred by reports that House leaders are trying to fast-track a bill to separate the U.S. Copyright Office from the Library of Congress, a coalition of consumer rights, industry, open internet and library groups has again sent a letter to the House Committee on Administration urging it to consider the bill on the regular timeline to avoid “unintended consequences.” A full committee markup of the bill is scheduled for tomorrow, March 18,

Yesterday, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and Peter Welch (D-VT) sent a letter addressed to Liang Rubo, CEO of Chinese technology company ByteDance, urging the immediate shutdown of ByteDance’s video generation platform Seedance 2.0. Calling ByteDance’s recent pledges to respect copyright “a delay tactic,” the Senators join a growing chorus of copyright advocates raising alarms about rampant infringement being committed by users of Seedance and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) platforms.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) today released its 2026 International IP Index, which flagged concerning trends about the “growing erosion of IP leadership” among the world’s high-performing economies, according to the report’s authors. In particular, the report noted that scores in eight EU Member States have declined this year, although the top ten rankings remained the same from 2025. The United States was again number one, with a relatively stable score of 95.15% compared with last year’s 95.17%.

Just over a month ago, the Human Artistry Campaign launched “Stealing Isn’t Innovation”—a graphic advertising campaign backed by over 1,000 artists, performers, authors, organizations and other creators. The Copyright Alliance joined dozens of groups and organizations supporting this powerful moment of creative community unity and strength. The campaign’s high-level three-word-message was simple and obvious, and difficult to contest. On a policy level, the campaign was widely, and correctly, understood as a clear statement supporting the core principle that training AI models on copyrighted works should be licensed by willing buyers and sellers.  “Big AI” published its response to this campaign in late February, speaking through two tech-aligned proxies—the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) and Public Knowledge (PK). For a number of reasons, it’s deeply unpersuasive. 

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list including the denial of a petition for writ of certiorari filed by Dr. Stephen Thaler that challenged federal agency and court rulings preventing copyright registration for an image generated entirely by artificial intelligence (AI). In following the U.S. Solicitor General’s call to deny cert to Thaler’s appeal, the Supreme Court declined invitations from both sides of the AI authorship debate to clarify the copyrightability of works that are substantially AI-generated.