Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP - Keith Kelly and Zach Dai, Lexology; Computer Love: Beijing Court Finds AI-Generated Image is Copyrightable in Split with United States
"In a decision issued[1] November 27, 2023, a Chinese court ruled that AI-generated content can enjoy protection under copyright law. The finding, the first of its kind in China, is in direct conflict with the human authorship requirement under U.S. copyright law and may have far-reaching implications."
Aaron Wininger of Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A., The National Law Review; Beijing Internet Court Recognizes Copyright in AI-Generated Images
"On November 27, 2023 the Beijing Internet Court issued a decision recognizing copyright in AI-generated images. The plaintiff, Mr. Li, used Stable Diffusion (an artificial intelligence) to generate the image involved in the case and published it on the Xiaohongshu platform; the defendant, a blogger on Baijiahao, used the image generated by the plaintiff’s AI to accompany the article, and the plaintiff sued. The Court held that the artificial intelligence-generated image involved in the case met the requirements of “originality” and reflected a human’s original intellectual investment and should be recognized as works and protected by copyright law. This is the opposite of the decision reached by the U.S. Copyright Office in Zarya of the Dawn (Registration # VAu001480196) that did not recognize copyright in AI-generated images. Note this Beijing case is also different from the recent Thaler v. Perlmutter decision (Civil Action No. 22-1564 (BAH)) because Thaler was trying to recognize the AI as the author and not the person using the AI as a tool as author."
Simon Sharwood, The Register; US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI
"China has a playbook to use IP theft to seize leadership in cloud computing, and other nations should band together to stop that happening, according to Nathaniel C. Fick, the US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy.
Speaking at an event hosted by think tank Hudson Institute, Fick said 30 years ago democratic nations felt they had an "unassailable global advantage in telecoms" thanks to the strength of outfits like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Bell Labs, Alcatel and Lucent.
But he feels those titans became complacent, governments stopped watching the tech develop, and "I don't think we appreciated or acted on the reality that these technologies were going to be central to our geopolitical standing."
But China noticed. And it "executed a deliberate strategy of IP theft and government subsidies."
PAUL R. MICHEL AND MATTHEW J. DOWD, The Hill; Patents, spy balloons and outcompeting China: What our leaders are missing
"For all of U.S. history, patents have provided the needed incentives. Without reliable patent protection, few corporate decision-makers or venture capital leaders would make the investments to support the breakthroughs.
And now, more breakthroughs are exactly what America needs to counter China’s accelerating technology surge. Think computer chips, genetic and personalized medicine, clean energy, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies of the 21st century.
But we’re starting to lag behind China, which is devoting untold resources toward becoming the global leader. A recent Harvard Kennedy School report warned that China is set to overtake the United States, if U.S. policy does not change."
Stu Woo and Daniel Michaels, The Wall Street Journal; China’s Newest Weapon to Nab Western Technology—Its Courts
Rulings nullify patents in industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals
"The growing conflict between China and the U.S. extends from computer-chip factories to a suspected spy balloon over American skies. Running through it all is a struggle for technological superiority.
China has striven for years to develop cutting-edge technologies, in part through heavy spending on research. Now, according to Western officials and executives, it also has mobilized its legal system to pry technology from other nations.
Officials in the U.S. and European Union accuse China of using its courts and patent panels to undermine foreign intellectual-property rights and help Chinese businesses. They say China is focusing such efforts on industries it deems important, including technology, pharmaceuticals and rare-earth minerals."
"Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found here.
The head of ASML, the chip toolmaker that is Europe’s biggest tech company, said he was guarding against intellectual property theft more fiercely than “ever before”, as a geopolitical tussle forces China to bolster its homegrown semiconductor industry. Peter Wennink said growing restrictions imposed by the US on China’s ability to source cutting-edge chips and semiconductor equipment had raised the stakes for the company’s security efforts. “It’s like 1973, it’s like the oil crisis,” Wennink told the Financial Times, pointing to increasing efforts by the US, Europe and Japan to bolster their domestic chipmaking capabilities. “Oil was always there until it wasn’t, and it was a strategic commodity. Fast forward to 2020 and it’s the same thing with chips.”"
AND , The Globe and Mail; With an unruly China, safeguarding intellectual property is vital to national security
"There is an urgent need for a new Canadian national security policy that considers new and emerging threats.
Such a policy should begin with a strong economic foundation that privileges the domestic development of intangible assets, IP, and the use and commercialization of data, as well as the strategic injection of Canadian technology into international markets. That, in turn, requires a better understanding of the relationship between IP and national security."
, The New York Times Magazine ; The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets
"Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.'
Like China’s economy, the spying carried out on its behalf is directed by the Chinese state. The Ministry of State Security, or M.S.S., which is responsible for gathering foreign intelligence, is tasked with collecting information in technologies that the Chinese government wants to build up. The current focus, according to U.S. counterintelligence experts, aligns with the “Made in China 2025” initiative announced in 2015. This industrial plan seeks to make China the world’s top manufacturer in 10 areas, including robotics, artificial intelligence, new synthetic materials and aerospace. In the words of one former U.S. national security official, the plan is a “road map for theft.”"
Nicholas Yong , BBC News; Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets
"It is part of a broader struggle as China strives to gain technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order, while the US does its best to prevent a serious competitor to American power from emerging.
The theft of trade secrets is attractive because it allows countries to "leapfrog up global value chains relatively quickly - and without the costs, both in terms of time and money, of relying completely on indigenous capabilities", Nick Marro of the Economist Intelligence Unit told the BBC.
Last July FBI director Christopher Wray told a gathering of business leaders and academics in London that China aimed to "ransack" the intellectual property of Western companies so it can speed up its own industrial development and eventually dominate key industries.
He warned that it was snooping on companies everywhere "from big cities to small towns - from Fortune 100s to start-ups, folks that focus on everything from aviation, to AI, to pharma"."
Staff and agencies, The Guardian; US court sentences Chinese spy to 20 years for stealing trade secrets
"A US federal court has sentenced a Chinese intelligence officer to 20 years in prison after he was convicted last year of plotting to steal trade secrets from from US and French aviation and aerospace companies.
Xu Yanjun was accused of a lead role in a five-year Chinese state-backed scheme to steal commercial secrets from GE Aviation, one of the world’s leading aircraft engine manufacturers, and France’s Safran Group, which was working with GE on engine development.
Xu was one of 11 Chinese nationals, including two intelligence officers, named in October 2018 indictments in federal court in Cincinnati, Ohio, where GE Aviation is based."
NICOLE SGANGA, CBS News; Chinese hackers took trillions in intellectual property from about 30 multinational companies
"A yearslong malicious cyber operation spearheaded by the notorious Chinese state actor, APT 41, has siphoned off an estimated trillions in intellectual property theft from approximately 30 multinational companies within the manufacturing, energy and pharmaceutical sectors.
A new report by Boston-based cybersecurity firm, Cybereason, has unearthed a malicious campaign — dubbed Operation CuckooBees — exfiltrating hundreds of gigabytes of intellectual property and sensitive data, including blueprints, diagrams, formulas, and manufacturing-related proprietary data from multiple intrusions, spanning technology and manufacturing companies in North America, Europe, and Asia.
"We're talking about Blueprint diagrams of fighter jets, helicopters, and missiles," Cybereason CEO Lior Div told CBS News. In pharmaceuticals, "we saw them stealing IP of drugs around diabetes, obesity, depression." The campaign has not yet been stopped.
Cybercriminals were focused on obtaining blueprints for cutting-edge technologies, the majority of which were not yet patented, Div said.
The intrusion also exfiltrated data from the energy industry – including designs of solar panel and edge vacuum system technology. "This is not [technology] that you have at home," Div noted. "It's what you need for large-scale manufacturing plants.""
, The New York Times; China Continues to Fall Short of Promises to Protect Intellectual Property, U.S. Says
"The Office of the United States Trade Representative criticized China, Russia and other countries on Wednesday for continuing to fall short of promises to protect intellectual property in a report that cataloged various infringements by America’s trading partners.
The annual report placed 27 trading partners on so-called watch lists for intellectual property infringement, and labeled Argentina, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Venezuela as being on a “priority watch list” of countries that had the most egregious practices or the biggest effect on U.S. businesses...
China remains the largest single source of counterfeit and pirated goods, accounting for more than 83 percent of what global authorities seized in 2020, the report said. That included medical products like Covid-19 testing kits, N95 respirator masks, sanitizers and disinfectants."
Harris Bricken - Fred Rocafort, Lexology; AI and Copyright in China
"In the landmark Shenzhen Tencent v. Shanghai Yingxun case, the Nanshan District People’s Court considered whether an article written by Tencent’s AI software Dreamwriter was entitled to copyright protection. The court found that it was, with copyright vesting in Dreamwriter’s developers, not Dreamwriter itself. In its decision, the court noted that “the arrangement and selection of the creative team in terms of data input, trigger condition setting, template and corpus style choices are intellectual activities that have a direct connection with the specific expression of the article.” These intellectual activities were carried out by the software developers.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has distinguished between works that are generated without human intervention (“AI-generated”) and works generated with material human intervention and/or direction (“AI-assisted”). In the case of AI-assisted works, artificial intelligence is arguably just a tool used by humans. Vesting of copyright in the humans involved in these cases is consistent with existing copyright law, just as an artist owns the copyright to a portrait made using a paintbrush or a song recorded using a guitar. The scenario in the Tencent case falls in the AI-assisted bucket, with Dreamwriter being the tool."
United States Patent and Trademark Office Webinar; E-commerce and China: Strategies for fighting online counterfeits, Part 2
"E-commerce now accounts for nearly 14% of all retail sales, and continues to grow at a healthy rate. But U.S. businesses engaged in e-commerce, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), face a number of challenges in protecting their intellectual property (IP) on e-commerce platforms.
Register now for this free program to learn proven strategies for protecting and enforcing your IP rights when selling on e-commerce platforms.
Part 2 of the two-part series will focus on administrative and judicial mechanisms for enforcing IP rights and combatting the sale of Chinese counterfeits on e-commerce platforms in China. The program will feature presentations by senior United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) IP attorneys with extensive China IP experience and experts from Mattel, Specialized Bicycles, and Amazon.
Topics to be covered include:
During the program, participants can submit their questions to a dedicated email box. There will be time allotted to respond to participants' questions.
(Note: Although some advanced IP topics may be touched upon in the webinar, the materials presented are intended for representatives from SMEs with limited experience in IP protection and enforcement in China.)"
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); E-commerce and China: Strategies for fighting online counterfeits, Part 2
December 2, 2021 9 AM - 10:30 AM ET
"E-commerce now accounts for nearly 14% of all retail sales, and continues to grow at a healthy rate. But U.S. businesses engaged in e-commerce, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), face a number of challenges in protecting their intellectual property (IP) on e-commerce platforms.
Register now for this free program to learn proven strategies for protecting and enforcing your IP rights when selling on e-commerce platforms.
Part 2 of the two-part series will focus on administrative and judicial mechanisms for enforcing IP rights and combatting the sale of Chinese counterfeits on e-commerce platforms in China. The program will feature presentations by senior United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) IP attorneys with extensive China IP experience and experts from Mattel, Specialized Bicycles, and Amazon.
Topics to be covered include:
