Posts in Technology & Innovation

Music publishing companies Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord filed suit on Wednesday, October 18, in a Tennessee district court against generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, Anthropic, alleging “widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” Anthropic’s core product is the AI ChatBot, Claude, which can be used to generate song lyrics to popular songs owned by the publishers or to generate “original” song lyrics in response to “requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter,” for example, according to the complaint. These outputs also copy the publishers’ lyrics because Claude is trained on the infringing works and does not license the copyrights to those works, like other music lyric aggregators, said the publishers.

Innovation has been the driving force behind our country since its inception. So much of our nation’s success has flowed from U.S. ingenuity and innovation. Yet much remains to be done on this front. Indeed, in a few short years, we will be celebrating the Semiquincentennial (also called the Sestercentennial)—250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. We need the same approach moving forward, and we have the opportunity to do so with pending legislation, which brings me to a chance to reflect on some important questions of intellectual property and innovation policy.

IPWatchdog’s Life Sciences Masters 2023 concluded today, following three days of panels that tackled some of the most pressing issues facing intellectual property professionals in the life sciences space. In the spotlight was the Biden Administration’s recent passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its potential impact on future drug development in the United States. Prescription drug pricing controls are one aspect of the IRA, a landmark piece of legislation passed by Congress last August that also directs funding to be spent on clean energy projects and increased tax enforcement. The IRA authorizes the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary to establish a Drug Price Negotiation Program, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1320f, to establish maximum fair prices of certain drugs that become eligible for the program because they constitute a large portion of expenditures by Medicare Part B and Part D patients. Pharmaceutical companies who do not agree to the price set during negotiations with HHS will have to pay a new excise tax codified at 26 U.S.C. § 5000D calculated based on daily sales and starting at 65%.

The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) released a sprawling report on Tuesday analyzing market dynamics surrounding the question of whether to extend the waiver of IP rights for COVID-19 technologies under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) to diagnostics and therapeutics. The report stopped short of making any recommendations, but ultimately did not find any definitive evidence that IP rights present a barrier to access in the context of COVID diagnostics and therapeutics. However, it largely amounts to a reiteration of talking points on both sides and seemingly does little to further the debate.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari to review a February ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) that held claims of ChromaDex, Inc.’s patent on an isolated form of vitamin B3 are directed to unpatentable subject matter under Section 101. The CAFC affirmed the Delaware district court’s grant of summary judgment for Elysium Health that the relevant claims of U.S. Patent No. 8,197,807, titled “Nicotinamide riboside kinase compositions and methods for using the same,” were invalid under Section 101 as being directed to a natural phenomenon, specifically, “compositions comprising isolated [NR], a naturally occurring vitamin present in cow milk.”

This week in Washington IP news, Congress returns from its district work period with the House holding several meetings related to IP and innovation. The House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet holds a hearing on IP competition with China and another subcommittee discusses safeguarding data in the growing AI industry. Elsewhere, IPWatchdog is hosting its Life Sciences Masters™ program in Ashburn, VA, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office hosts a panel discussion for its ongoing Women’s Entrepreneurship (WE) program

Last month, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) announced that it had joined with 30 other signatories to publish a framework of intellectual property principles designed to reshape the narrative around intellectual property (IP) rights and maintain America’s global lead in innovation. Broadly speaking, the principles focus on five primary goals to be achieved by American lawmakers and policymakers: 1) national security, 2) technological leadership, 3) fostering creative expression, 4) enforcing the rule of law, and 5) ensuring full access to the innovation ecosystem for all.

California is poised to become the third state to enact a right to repair law aimed at making it easier for independent repair shops and consumers to repair electronic devices. This might sound well and good—until you think about what it actually means for IP owners. While repair advocates may not care about, or even acknowledge, the IP side of the equation, the not-so-hidden truth of the right to repair movement is that it expands repair opportunities for consumers by taking away the rights of copyright and patent owners. Indeed, the foundational premise of the repair movement is that there is something inherently wrong when an IP owner exercises its right to exclude and imposes a repair restriction. Of course, this lopsided view elevates access over incentives, and it ignores how IP law itself promotes the public good by rewarding creators and innovators for their individual efforts. But, more importantly, it’s not up to the states to second-guess Congress’s judgment.

In recent months, two U.S. government executive initiatives have reshaped the landscape concerning intellectual property and the domestic production of products resulting from federally funded research. These initiatives are poised to bring substantial changes to the dynamics of academic-industry collaborations as inventions are brought to market.

On September 6, OpenAI faced its second invasion of privacy lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California, for allegedly stealing private information from millions of internet users. While the Plaintiffs acknowledge in their complaint that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to create life-saving technologies and herald discoveries that could improve our daily lives, they claim OpenAI crossed the line of using altruistic means of reaching its objective when it abruptly restructured itself into a for-profit business. Following this restructuring, the Plaintiffs allege OpenAI scraped private information from millions of users to train their Large Language Models. Here are five key allegations from the privacy suit against OpenAI.

On October 2, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced that Hungarian-American biochemist Katalin Karikó and American immunologist Drew Weissman were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries related to modified messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for use in vaccines. A critical part of the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, mRNA vaccines were not an effective option until the pioneering work of these two scientists, one of whom faced considerable rejection while laying the foundation that answered one of the world’s greatest public health crises.

Just about everyone bundles. It’s about as American as apple pie: if you buy more, you get a better price. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. Consumers benefit from lower prices. The question is, can bundling violate the antitrust laws? It can. So, the real question is, how do we determine when a generally good thing – bundling – should be condemned under the sledgehammer that is antitrust? In cases where usually beneficial conduct is challenged as anticompetitive, clear standards and tests are critically important so that a good thing is not stifled by uncertainty.

Last week, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) reached a tentative three-year deal to resolve a writer’s strike following a labor dispute with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The deal was reached on September 27, 2023, after a 148-day strike, which was the second-longest in the union’s history. According to USA Today, the WGA’s leadership board has lifted the restraining order barring writers from returning to work, and its members will vote to officially ratify the agreement between October 2 and October 9. In a storyline that at one time would have been considered science fiction, a major point of contention between writers and producers was the use of artificial intelligence in the screenwriting process.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has extended the deadline for comments on its joint request for comments (RFC) with the International Trade Administration (ITA) and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) on the agencies’ collaboration initiative concerning standards and intellectual property. In a Federal Register Notice (FRN) published today, the USPTO announced the new deadline will be November 6, 2023. The original deadline was September 29.

Privacy and data security issues can scuttle a deal or at least cost the parties a lot of money. For example, in the due diligence process involving the 2017 acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon, Yahoo disclosed two serious data breaches that compromised over a billion accounts. Yahoo had previously attempted to cover this up. The deal went ahead for nearly $4.5 billion but not before Verizon knocked $350 million off the transaction price and Yahoo paid over $100 million to settle SEC fraud charges and class action lawsuits.