Posts in Copyright

On August 21, wikiHow, Inc. filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI, Inc. and eight affiliated entities, alleging violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI copied wikiHow’s how-to articles without authorization to train ChatGPT and to ground its outputs, then used that copied content to generate substitutes for wikiHow’s website.

U.S. companies planning to enter Nigeria typically build a careful playbook for market research, distribution, hiring, and regulatory compliance. Intellectual property is often the item furthest down that list, treated as paperwork to handle once commercial activity is already underway. That sequencing is backwards, and it is worth understanding why.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling answering multiple questions of first impression regarding copyright claims involving building plans, including the scope of protection under the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) for constructed buildings and floorplan renderings. Vacating the Western District of Texas’ dismissal of Kipp Flores Architects’ (KFA) copyright infringement claims, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s dismissal of KFA’s claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) over alleged failures to include copyright management information (CMI) on new floorplans developed from KFA’s technical drawings.

On June 30, 2026, the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held a hearing titled, “A Midlife Crisis? IP and the Internet After 40,” which examined whether current U.S. intellectual property laws and enforcement mechanisms are effective against Internet-driven infringement and counterfeiting. The hearing focused on online counterfeiting, digital piracy, and AI-enabled or generated infringement and digital replicas. The hearing also considered the difficulty in enforcing rights against overseas operators, and enforcement tools to address these issues, including Schedule A litigation and website blocking.

Yesterday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued its latest study detailing the economic contributions of industries heavily reliant upon intellectual property rights, concluding that such IP-intensive industries contributed 44% of the United States’ entire gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024. Despite several key findings reflecting the rising value of IP rights to employee wages and job creation, the USPTO’s report noted significant trade deficits run by the United States relative to their foreign counterparts in commodity exports across several IP-intensive industries.

As an expert witness on intellectual property litigations, I have noticed over the past few years parties with poor arguments in software copyright and software trade secret cases, both plaintiffs and defendants, have been taking advantage of technologically outdated protective orders to gain an unfair advantage. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where probably the majority of software IP cases take place, has a Model Protective Order for Litigation Involving Patents, Highly Sensitive Confidential Information and/or Trade Secrets that has become a de facto standard for software IP cases around the country. It is antiquated and needs to be updated.

As government contractors rapidly integrate LLMs and generative AI into their operations, regulators are scrambling to adapt to shifting data ownership requirements.  The General Services Administration (GSA) recently proposed a new GSAR clause (552.239–7001) to standardize AI procurement, and the current draft has been met with widespread industry criticism. By asserting expansive government ownership over “data outputs” and “custom development,” the proposed rule inadvertently exposes a fault line between government data protection and commercial IP rights.

In a precedential decision authored by Judge Hughes on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) vacated-in-part and remanded a decision of the Court of Federal Claims that had awarded 4DD Holdings, LLC, and T4 Data Group, LLC $12,683,065.86 for the U.S. government’s infringement of their copyrighted software TETRA®. 4DD sued the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) for infringement of its copyrighted software, TETRA, which served as an interoperability solution for military healthcare records stored by the two agencies in separate databases (dubbed the “Defense Medical Information Exchange (DMIX) program).

A faith-technology company has done something the IP world should notice. Gloo — a Boulder, Colorado, firm that serves churches, ministries, and Christian universities, and now trades on the Nasdaq — built a benchmark it calls Flourishing AI Christian, or FAI-C. The finding is blunt: Today’s leading large language models, tested on questions of meaning, character, and faith, come up short. On a 100-point flourishing scale, the frontier models averaged 61. On the faith dimension, they scored worst of all.

The House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet held a hearing on Tuesday, titled “A Midlife Crisis? IP and the Internet After 40.” The hearing examined the changes that have occurred over the last four decades of the internet and featured witnesses including celebrities, academics and computer and media experts.

Stock photos. Blog thumbnails. Social media posts. Hero images. The image that makes a website look finished is often the same image that triggers a copyright demand letter. The facts usually are ordinary, not dramatic. A business hires a web designer or marketing contractor. The contractor pulls an image from someplace online, uses it on a site or post, and disappears. Months later, the owner receives a letter attaching a Visual Arts, or VA, registration and threatening statutory damages.

It’s easy to take for granted that books, news, films, shows, songs, video games, photographs, artwork, and more are ubiquitously available through apps, streams, downloads and other digital means. But the thriving legitimate digital marketplace we enjoy today didn’t emerge by accident. It was built, in significant part, on the historical bedrock of secondary liability—the well-established common-law legal principle that one who assists another in committing a wrong is just as liable as the direct wrongdoer. In the internet ecosystem, that means platforms, internet service providers (ISPs), and other online intermediaries bear some responsibility when they knowingly facilitate or profit from copyright infringement.

At a recent Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter noted that Congress may need to overturn this year’s unanimous decision in the Cox v. Sony Supreme Court case or create a new “site blocking” regime to force internet service providers (ISPs) to block access to certain internet sites. The only problem? To put it bluntly, she is wrong.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday denied motions to dismiss three copyright infringement lawsuits brought by a jury consultant, Lindsay Olson, against criminal defense attorneys representing defendants charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, who downloaded her copyrighted report from a public docket and republished it in their own clients’ cases.