Bob Zeidman

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and software trade secret cases, both plaintiffs and defendants, have been taking advantage of technologically outdated protective orders to gain an unfair advantage.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.

Much of the focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been on training data ingestion—the moment when AI “steals” from creators. But legally, that’s not where the real fight should be. Decades of legal precedent—from search engines to image?scanning to streaming media—already give us a roadmap. No new formulation of copyright law by Congress, as suggested by some academics, is necessary. By considering these seven unique aspects of GenAI systems, copyright analysis is actually easy.

As I described in my previous article about the protocol for clean room product development, there are often situations where a company has come into contact with intellectual property that it cannot allow to spread to a product in development. In that article, I described the concepts of a clean room. In this article, I describe the practical implementation details. Once a clean room protocol has been set up, the following sections describe the recommended procedure to implement.

There are often situations where a company has come into contact with intellectual property that it cannot allow to spread to a product in development. One example is a joint development project between two companies where the IP for the jointly developed product cannot seep into other products but where each company must develop products that interface with the jointly developed one. This situation can occur when groups create standards that involve IP from various sources.

The 56th anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek just passed on September 8. I recently moderated a panel discussion at the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, titled “Patents in the Future,” where I asked one of my favorite patent questions, one that most patent attorneys get wrong. If I find an alien invention and figure out how it works, can I patent it? I usually get the impatient answer “no” because I didn’t invent it—isn’t that obvious? But actually that’s not correct. I can get a patent.