Issues and developments related to IP, AI, and OM, examined in the IP and tech ethics graduate courses I teach at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. My Bloomsbury book "Ethics, Information, and Technology", coming in Summer 2025, includes major chapters on IP, AI, OM, and other emerging technologies (IoT, drones, robots, autonomous vehicles, VR/AR).
Kip Currier, PhD, JD
"A closely watched music copyright trial is set to begin Monday in federal court in Manhattan, where a jury will decide a lawsuit accusing Ed Sheeran of copying his Grammy-winning ballad “Thinking Out Loud” from Marvin Gaye’s soul classic “Let’s Get It On.”...
The music industry is keenly interested in the outcome. Over the last decade, the business has been rocked by a series of infringement suits that have involved questions of just how much or how little of the work of pop songwriters can be protected by copyright, and how vulnerable they are to legal challenges."
"Intellectual property, such as inventions, creative content and brands, is created by people. These are people with amazing ideas, creative passions, and desires to improve communities around the world. But it often takes time, money, and personal sacrifices to move these ideas, passions, and desired impacts from conception to reality. When we see these finished products, creative works, or impactful companies, what is their value?
During this year's World Intellectual Property Day celebration, with a global theme of "Women in IP: Accelerating Innovation and Creativity", we will revisit this idea about how we value intellectual property. We will look through the eyes of the women who have made countless sacrifices, overcame hurdles others did not have to face, and yet succeeded and made their companies, inventions and creative works into a thriving reality. This month we will feature incredible women across the U.S. and learn about their years of education, hours spent calling new customers, late nights researching after a full day of work, and money spent for studio time, all so that they can bring their intellectual property to us. These important sacrifices together equals The Value of Her IP!
The Value of Her IP event
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will celebrate World IP Day 2023, centering on the theme of "The Value of Her IP" on Wednesday, April 26, 2023, from 4:30-7:30 p.m. ET., at the U.S. Capitol building's Senate Visitors Center. The focus of the program will be hearing from women business owners, creators and inventors about the financial, time, and personal sacrifices that were necessary for them to create their intellectual property. Their stories will illustrate why it was critical to protect their investments through IP protections such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. The program will also stress the importance of increasing women's participation in the IP eco-system."
"Machine-learning is exponentially faster, though; it’s usually achieved by feeding millions, even billions of so-called “inputs” into an AI model to build its musical vocabulary. Due to the sheer scale of data needed to train current systems that almost always includes the work of professionals, and to many copyright owners’ dismay, almost no one asks their permission to use it.
Countries around the world have various ways of regulating what’s allowed when it comes to what’s called the text and data mining of copyrighted material for AI training. And some territories are concluding that fewer rules will lead to more business.
China, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are among the countries that have largely positioned themselves as safe havens for AI companies in terms of industry-friendly regulation. In January, Israel’s Ministry of Justice defined its stance on the issue, saying that “lifting the copyright uncertainties that surround this issue [of training AI generators] can spur innovation and maximize the competitiveness of Israeli-based enterprises in both [machine-learning] and content creation.”"
"An unprecedented surge in applications for US trademarks has unleashed an equally extraordinary rise in fraud schemes targeting applicants, leaving investigators struggling to keep up."
Trademark scams are on the rise, and bad actors are using increasingly devious and creative means to fool USPTO customers. Whether you're a trademark owner, applicant, or practitioner, you'll want to register for this important webinar on April 27, from 2-3:30 p.m. ET.
During an engaging panel discussion, our experts will give you practical tips for protecting yourself, your brand, and your clients from bad actors who:
Trick trademark owners into paying unnecessary fees
Engage in unauthorized conduct
Spoof legitimate attorneys and entities
Commit other fraudulent activities
A 30-minute question-and-answer session will follow the panel discussion. You may submit your questions before the event to TMWebinar@uspto.gov
We'll post a recording of this event to this page within three weeks of the event. All registrants will receive an email with the video link when it is ready.
"Forty-two German associations and trade unions representing more than 140,000 authors and performers on Wednesday urged the European Union to beef up draft artificial intelligence rules as they singled out the threat to their copyright from ChatGPT...
"The unauthorised usage of protected training material, its non-transparent processing, and the foreseeable substitution of the sources by the output of generative AI raise fundamental questions of accountability, liability and remuneration, which need to be addressed before irreversible harm occurs," the letter seen by Reuters said."
"The AI chatbot ChatGPT produces content that can appear to have been created by a human. There are many proposed uses for the technology, but its impressive capabilities raise important questions about ownership of the content.
UK legislation has a definition for computer-generated works. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 they are “generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. The law suggests content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) can be protected by copyright. However, the original sources of answers generated by AI chatbots can be difficult to trace – and they might include copyrighted works.
The first question is whether ChatGPT should be allowed to use original content generated by third parties to generate its responses. The second is whether only humans can be credited as the authors of AI-generated content, or whether the AI itself can be regarded as an author – particularly when that output is creative."
"Recognizing the blend of human and automated works
In remedying these conflicts, courts have a few options before them. Courts can declare all works using AI fall into the public domain on the grounds that they do not meet the creative, original or human-created requirements, or they could simply grant AI works copyright protection as a matter of course. However, the former would disincentivize AI development and the latter would disincentivize human creativity.
The third and more likely solution is somewhere in the middle, granting limited protection in AI works based on the degree of human involvement. The Copyright Office has recently taken this approach regarding an application for the comic book “Zarya of the Dawn,” granting rights to the human author’s writing and arrangement of AI-generated drawings, but not to the AI drawings themselves. This gradient, while perhaps frustrating to those who want greater clarity, is useful in determining the rights in the final product."
"Who owns the output of generative A.I.? For now, only a human’s work can be copyrighted, but what about work that partly relies on generative A.I.? Some tool developers have said they won’t assert copyright over content generated by their machines. In February, the Copyright Office rejected a copyright for A.I.-generated images in a graphic novel, though the writer argued that she had made the images via “a creative, iterative process” that involved “composition, selection, arrangement, cropping and editing for each image.” The government compared use of the A.I. tool to hiring an artist. But the lines may blur as the use of such tools becomes more common. Like the tools, the intellectual property issues are a work in progress that will only get more complex."
"This blog post will address three common myths many business leaders have about protecting their trade secrets.
Myth Number One: All Confidential Information is a Trade Secret.
Not all of your business's confidential information qualifies for trade secret protection. It's essential to understand the distinction between confidential information and trade secrets. While all trade secrets contain confidential information, not all confidential information qualifies as a trade secret. If you graphed these concepts as a Venn diagram, your business's trade secrets would be the smaller circle inside the more prominent "confidential information" circle.
Under most Uniform Trade Secret Acts adopted by individual states and the federal Defense of Trade Secrets Act, to be considered a trade secret, the business information must:
Have economic value derived from not being generally known or easily discoverable; and
Be subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.
Common examples of legally recognized trade secrets include proprietary formulas, manufacturing processes, pricing lists, and customer lists. However, general business information, employee data, or other information your business keeps from prying eyes may only meet the criteria for trade secret protection if it has a competitive economic use for your business. Knowing the difference between these essential concepts is critical to understanding where your business should focus its limited resources to protect its trade secrets."
"Currently, copyright law protects artists who are influenced by colleagues and mentors and the media they admire by permitting them to mimic elements of others’ work as long as their art isn’t “substantially similar” and/or is a fair use. Thus, the same legal doctrines that give artists the breathing room to find inspiration in others’ works also protect diffusion models. Rewriting those doctrines could cause harm far beyond any damage Stable Diffusion is causing.
In our companion blog post, we explore some of the other consequences. In particular, we discuss who would likely benefit from such a regime (spoiler: it’s not individual creators). We also discuss some alternative approaches that might actually help creators.
Done right, copyright law is supposed to encourage new creativity. Stretching it to outlaw tools like AI image generators—or to effectively put them in the exclusive hands of powerful economic actors who already use that economic muscle to squeeze creators—would have the opposite effect."
"What’s clear, however, is that the risk of doing nothing is tremendous. AI is rapidly evolving and disrupting existing systems and structures in unpredictable ways. We need disruptive innovation in AI policy perhaps even more than we need disruption in the technology itself — and AI creators and users must be willing participants in this endeavor. Efforts to grapple with the ethical, legal, social, and policy issues around AI must be viewed not as a luxury but as a necessity, and as an integral part of AI design. Otherwise, we run the risk of letting industry set the terms of AI’s future, and we leave individuals, groups, and even our very democracy vulnerable to its whims."
"This isn’t the first time technology and copyright law have crashed into each other. Google successfully defended itself against alawsuitby arguing that transformative use allowed for the scraping of text from books to create its search engine, and for the time being, this decision remains precedential.
But there are other, non-technological cases that could shape how the products of generative AI are treated. A case before the U.S. Supreme Court against the Andy Warhol Foundation — brought by photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who had licensed an image of the late musician,Prince— could refine U.S. copyright law on the issue of when a piece of art is sufficiently different from its source material to become unequivocally “transformative,” and whether a court can consider the meaning of the derivative work when it evaluates that transformation. If the court finds that the Warhol piece is not a fair use, it could mean trouble for AI-generated works.
All this uncertainty presents a slew of challenges for companies that use generative AI. There are risks regarding infringement — direct or unintentional — in contracts that are silent on generative AI usage by their vendors and customers. If a business user is aware that training data might include unlicensed works or that an AI can generate unauthorized derivative works not covered by fair use, a business could be on the hook for willful infringement, which can include damages up to $150,000 for each instance of knowing use. There’s also the risk of accidentally sharing confidential trade secrets or business information by inputting data into generative AI tools."
[This session will be live via Zoom and also recorded for asynchronous viewing, following processing by Pitt. See registration link.]
There has been a recent uptick in attempts to remove or ban certain books from schools, public libraries and other educational spaces. In 2022 alone, 4 in 10 banned books contained LGBTQIA+ themes and representation, according to PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression through the advancement of literature and human rights.
Join the University Library System and the Pitt Queer Professionals for a lively virtual panel discussion with education, literary and legal experts on intellectual freedom and the societal impact of banning books. Guest panelists will be Dr. James “Kip” Currier, Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information (SCI) in the Information Culture and Data Stewardship (ICDS) Department, Dr. Katrina Bartow Jacobs, Associate Professor of Practice of Language, Literacy, and Culture within the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Leading and Jeff Trexler, Interim Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an American non-profit organization formed to protect the First Amendment rights of comics creators, publishers, and retailers. The panel will be moderated by Acacia O’Connor (they/them/theirs) currently the University’s Executive Director of Social Media, and former manager of the Kids’ Right to Read Project of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Internet Archive: Judge’s copyright ruling is a “blow to all libraries.”
"On Friday, a US district judge ruled in favor of book publishers suing the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement. The IA’s Open Library project—which partners with libraries to scan print books in their collections and offer them as lendable e-books—had no right to reproduce 127 of the publishers’ books named in the suit, judge John Koeltl decided."
Saxon Baird, The Guardian; Can you copyright a rhythm? Inside the reggaeton lawsuit that could shake the pop world
"While rhythms are not generally protected under copyright law in the US, a rhythm may be copyrighted if it can be proved that it is substantially unique or original."
"A new coalition to meet those challenges called the Human Artistry Campaign was announced at the South by Southwest conference on Thursday, with support from more than 40 organizations, including the Recording Academy, the National Music Publishers Association, the Recording Industry of America and many others.
With a stated goal “to ensure artificial intelligence technologies are developed and used in ways that support human culture and artistry – and not ways that replace or erode it,” the organization outlined principles advocating AI best practices, “emphasizing respect for artists, their work, and their personas; transparency; and adherence to existing law including copyright and intellectual property,” which are outlined in full below. The campaign urges supporters to sign a petition to advance those principles."
"The Archive ramped up its lending during the COVID-19 pandemic and has not cut back even though life has more or less returned to normal. The Archive argues that it’s doing what any library does — it’s lending books that it owns, and it’s controlling how many people can borrow a book at any given time. In other words, it’s not simply making electronic versions of its books available for mass download. That may show some desire to act responsibly on the Archive’s part, but that doesn’t make it legal."
"This case involves the federal trademark statutes and whether and when parody is protected speech. The whiskey company claims that the imitation Bad Spaniels bottle has appropriated the iconic Jack Daniel's design for just one purpose, to sell a chewy dog toy. And by doing that, the company claims, Jack's property rights have been infringed, even if the chewy dog toy is expressive."
"On May 23, 1930, President Herbert Hoover signed into law a bill called the Plant Patent Act. This bill was created to encourage private investment in plant breeding while protecting growers who spent extensive time (sometimes years) and money perfecting a cultivar only to have their invention freely reproduced and sold by others for profit."
"Today, the Internet Archive (IA) defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to users of its Open Library. In 2020, four of thewealthiest book publishers sued IA, alleging this kind of digital lending was actually “willful digital piracy” causing them “massive harm.”"
One idea under consideration by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office is to fund community colleges to produce their own textbooks. The system must decide how to spend $115 million in state funds set aside to reduce the burden of textbook costs. Every community college will receive $20,000 to design zero-textbook-cost programs and an additional $180,000 to implement them. Some colleges will also get larger, competitive grants.
Colleges could spend the money on anything from publishing their own textbooks to using free, publicly available textbooks — known as “open educational resources” — created by professors at other schools. They could also simply give some students money to buy traditional textbooks."
"In the tale of two Dubliners, the almost-half-century-old Washington, D.C.,Dublinerpub is suing a newly openedBoston pub of the same nameover trademark infringement and claiming that another pub with the same name would cause confusion, according toUniversal Hub’s reporting.
The Washington Dubliner’s suit against the East Coast Tavern Group requests that it change the Boston pub’s name and transfer its profits made under the Dubliner name to the D.C. establishment."
"A federal judge has sided with an artist who used a photograph of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her art without the permission of the photo agency that sued her."
"Why is it so important to the publishers that the Internet Archive not be identified as a library? Primarily because Congress has long recognized the valuable role that libraries play in our copyright system and has created special allowances in the law for their work. In this suit, the publishers seek to redefine the Internet Archive on their own terms and, in so doing, deny it the ability to leverage the same legal tools that thousands of other libraries use to lend and disseminate materials to our users.
The argument that the Internet Archive isn’t a library is wrong. If this argument is accepted, the results would jeopardize the future development of digital libraries nationwide. The Internet Archive is the most significant specialized library to emerge in decades. It is one of the only major memory institutions to be created from the emergence of the internet. It is, and continues to be, a modern-day cultural institution built intentionally in response to the technological revolution through which we’ve lived."
"The precise look of the suits, however, remained a closely guarded trade secret. Those on display came with an outer layer that was charcoal grey with dashes of orange and blue and Axiom's logo on the chest - intended to obscure Axiom's proprietary outer fabric design."
"Sonny and Cherstarted performing together in 1964 and married in 1967, rising to fame with major hits like “I Got You Babe,” “The Beat Goes On” and “Baby Don’t Go.” But the pair split up in 1974, finalizing their divorce with a settlement agreement in 1978. Under that deal, Sonny retained ownership of their music rights, but Cher was granted a half-share of all royalties.
Bono died in 1998 as the result of a skiing accident, leaving Mary in control of those copyrights. And in 2016, she invoked the termination right — a provision of the federal Copyright Act that allows creators or their heirs to win back control of rights they signed away decades prior. Mary sent such notices to Sonny and Cher’s publishers, taking back full control of those copyrights.
Five years later, Cher filed her lawsuit — seeking a ruling that the divorce agreement was still in effect and that she was still owed her 50% cut of royalties, regardless of who owns the copyrights now. Mary then fired back a few months later, arguing that the case should be dismissed. Her lawyers said that termination rights were designed to trump all preexisting agreements, including a divorce agreement.
“Cher’s position would subvert Congress’ intent in enacting the copyright termination provisions: to ensure that authors and authors’ heirs, not grantees or ex-spouses, would benefit from the extended term of copyright,” Bono’s attorneys wrote in December 2021."
"The US Supreme Court is set to weigh three high-profile intellectual property cases in a seven-day stretch testing the bounds of branded parodies, broad drug patent claims, and international application of trademark law.
The arguments could result in rulings with wide-ranging impacts on areas including First Amendment expression, pharmaceutical research and development, and damages calculations. The US solicitor general will argue in all three cases, signaling the government’s strong interest in their outcomes.
Here’s what to expect during the high court’s blockbuster IP week."
The Copyright Office issues this statement of policy to clarify its practices for examining and registering works that contain material generated by the use of artificial intelligence technology."
"A new policy report from the U.S. Copyright Office says that songs and other artistic works created with the assistance of artificial intelligence can sometimes be eligible for copyright registration, but only if the ultimate author remains a human being.
Under the rules laid out in the report, the Copyright Office said that anyone submitting such works must disclose which elements were created by AI and which were created by a human. The agency said that any AI-inclusive work that was previously registered without such a disclosure must be updated — and that failure to do so could result in the cancellation of the copyright registration.
Though aimed at providing guidance, Wednesday’s report avoided hard-and-fast rules. It stressed that analyzing copyright protection for AI-assisted works would be “necessarily a case-by-case inquiry,” and that the final outcome would always depend on individual circumstances, including “how the AI tool operates” and “how it was used to create the final work.”
And the report didn’t even touch on a potentially thornier legal question: whether the creators of AI platforms infringe the copyrights of the vast number of earlier works that are used to “train” the platforms to spit out new works."
"Jane C. Ginsburg, professor of literary and artistic property Law at Columbia University School of Law in New York, previously toldNewsweekthat the principle that the writers of letters, not the recipients, retain the copyright in the text has been "well-established in copyright law" for hundreds of years.
"Going back to a famous case from 1741, in which poet Alexander Pope sued Edmond Curll for publishing Pope's letters," Ginsburg said. "Pope prevailed. Lord Justice Hardwick announced a distinction between the 'property of the paper' which belonged to the recipient of the letters, and the property in the words, which remained with the writer.""
"According to Wikipedia,The Last Time I Saw Paris(1954), is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "Babylon Revisited." It stars Elizabeth Taylor, Van Johnson, Walter Pidgeon, Donna Reed, Eva Gabor, Kurt Kasznar, and Roger Moore and has 2.9 out of 5 stars on Letterboxd. It looks like it's worth watching just because Elizabeth Taylor is so beautiful.
The film entered the public domain 10 years early because someone at the studio goofed when they added the Roman numerals to the copyright notice."
"Yet a nation’s cultural life is not a minor matter, and preserving artists’ rights is essential to ensuring their continued contribution. Any reasonable interpretation of existing copyright lawoughtto protect against abuses, but that doesn’t always happen. A case now before the Supreme Courtinvolvingthe artist Andy Warhol’s unauthorized use of a photographer’s image of the musician Prince could dictate the direction copyright law will take in the coming years.
But another solution may be needed: new laws and regulations governing AI and safeguarding the human core of creative artistry.
As the physicist Stephen Hawkingwrote, “If a superior alien civilization sent us a message saying, ‘We’ll arrive in a few decades,’ would we just reply, ‘OK, call us when you get here – we’ll leave the lights on’? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI.” That was nine years ago. It’s still happening."
"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 recentHarvard Kennedy School reportwarned that China is set to overtake the United States, if U.S. policy does not change."
"Across the industry this year, big-selling drugs from Johnson & Johnson, Takeda, AstraZeneca, Roche and other companies are set to face their first generic or biosimilar challengers in the U.S. As always, the patent expirations should create quite a shake-up for many of the industry’s top players."
