Posts Tagged: "technology"

The contentious issues surrounding Right to Repair are getting super-heated as the U.S. Copyright Office concludes its triennial rulemaking review of exemptions to section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Exemptions granted would be in force for three years beginning October 2024.  When is an exemption not an exemption? When it’s an exemption from common sense.

On August 30, the U.S. Copyright Office issued a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register seeking public comment on a range of issues related to the intersection of copyright law and artificial intelligence (AI). The recent notice is the latest action by the Office on the myriad of copyright issues that have been arising around the use of generative AI platforms including infringement liability for training AI systems on copyrighted content and human authorship requirements.

Given current and ongoing economic realities, patent practitioners—both in-house and outside counsel—are constantly being asked to do more within existing budgets. Meanwhile, more robust patent applications thick with technical detail are necessary to satisfy courts and patent offices around the world. Working within budgetary constraints without sacrificing quality requires outside the box thinking and use of available tools to streamline as much of the process as possible. Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is taking the world by storm, and recently garnered the attention of the American Bar Association, which has just announced the creation of a task force that will examine the impact of AI on law practice and the ethical implications of its use for lawyers.

Autonomous vehicles were designed with the purpose of minimizing accidents on urban roads and providing more safety and comfort, assisting or performing independently some tasks that are the driver’s responsibility. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has developed a classification of autonomous vehicles, creating six categories for autonomous driving. Level zero refers to conventional cars without any technology of this type, while at the other extreme, at level five, the driver becomes a passenger, needing only to activate the vehicle and indicate the destination. In such case, it is up to the vehicle control system to carry out in a fully autonomous way the driving of the vehicle throughout the route and to carry out any emergency decision-making. The intermediate levels of autonomous driving include systems already found on the market, such as parking assistance, emergency braking and lane change assistance, among others.

On Thursday, Reuters reported that Google sent a letter to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) criticizing proposed rule changes that the tech firm believes will stifle U.S. innovation. The internet giant expressly pointed to the field of artificial intelligence as a weak point for the USPTO and its patent examiners. The letter was signed by Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel for Google.

Following years of infringement litigation over its patented wireless chip technologies, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has recently enjoyed a pair of settlement outcomes pointing to the strength of the research university’s patent holdings. The accused technologies in those cases overlap with other Caltech patent suits currently pending, which could presage further settlements recognizing the value of the university’s R&D activities.

The commercialization of space flight and space exploration has given rise to many inventions being deployed into outer space and onto celestial bodies. Inventors seeking to enforce their patent rights are challenged by the territorial nature of intellectual property laws. The current treaties do not protect the inventors’ rights against infringement.

The recently-concluded term of the U.S. Supreme Court featured four intellectual property decisions: one patent case, two trademark cases, and one copyright case. Three of the four opinions were unanimous, citing fundamental and time-honored precedents for support. The only dissent involved a copyright dispute centering on Andy Warhol’s use of a third-party photograph of Prince in his work. That case resulted in a highly charged debate between Justices Sotomayor and Kagan as to whether Warhol’s copying constituted transformative fair use.

The past year has provided decades’ worth of developments across law and policy in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. If 2022 was the breakthrough year for accessible AI, then 2023 can so far be deemed as the first year of likely many more to come in the era of an AI inquisition. “After years of somewhat academic discourse,” reflects Dr. Ryan Abbott, “AI and copyright law have finally burst into the public consciousness—from contributing to the writer’s strike to a wave of high-profile cases alleging copyright infringement from machine learning to global public hearings on the protectability of AI-generated works.” Both the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) are in active litigation over the eligibility of generative AI outputs for statutory protection. Additionally, both offices have held numerous webinars and listening sessions and conducted other methods of collecting feedback from the public as they work through policy considerations surrounding AI.

Everyone’s talking about artificial intelligence (AI), but not everyone’s talking about it the same way. The tenor of the global conversation on AI ranges from dystopian fearmongering to evangelistic optimism. It’s vital to know the prevailing mood in the territory where you plan to launch your AI-powered service, app, or consultancy. In this article, we’ll briefly tour recent legislation, ethical conversations, and economic strategies to demonstrate how varied current thinking is on this revolutionary new technology. We’ll look at the current situation in the United States, Canada, Europe, China, Japan and beyond, as countries develop the policies, guidelines and laws necessary to regulate AI innovation without stifling creativity.

Voice cloning, a technology that enables the replication of human voices from large language models using artificial intelligence (AI), presents both exciting possibilities and legal challenges. Recent machine-learning advances have made it possible for people’s voices to be imitated with only a few short seconds of a voice sample as training data. It’s a development that brings exciting possibilities for personalized and immersive experiences, such as creating realistic voiceovers for content, lifelike personal assistants and even preserving the voices of loved ones for future generations. But it’s also ripe with potential for abuse, as it could easily be used to commit fraud, spread misinformation and generate fake audio evidence.

Recently, it has come to my attention that a system that utilizes a camera to capture images and software to run facial recognition is being rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) as an abstract idea. Why? Well, it unfortunately seems that the reason is simply because the purpose of this very tangible, working system is to identify people and charge them a fare. Because money is overtly involved, for reasons that make no rational sense, this is being deemed a business method, despite the facial recognition technology—and even though this is a clean, streamlined approach for conducting commerce.

On July 31, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) hosted a virtual workshop titled Transforming Discoveries into Products: Maximizing NIH’s Levers to Catalyze Technology Transfer. Public comments submitted to the NIH ahead of the event reflect current tensions between advocates supporting either private commercialization or government pricing control of federally-funded medical breakthroughs commercialized by private companies.

On July 7, 2023, Administrative Law Judge Cameron Elliot issued a Notice of Initial Determination in favor of computer and graphics processor maker AMD. See In the Matter of Certain Graphics Systems, Components Thereof, and Digital Televisions Containing the Same (No. 337-TA-1318). This puts AMD one step closer to preventing TCL and Realtek from importing smart TVs and components containing infringing graphics processors in its patent infringement case at the International Trade Commission (ITC).