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Diego Freire

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Diego F. Freire is Senior Attorney in the firm’s Intellectual Property Group. He concentrates his practice on intellectual property law matters, including patent and trademark prosecution, due diligence, and clearance/opinion matters.

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Takeaways

  • Use in commerce: AI-generated outputs containing third-party marks may constitute use in commerce even when the reproduction is unintentional, particularly where the AI tool competes with the trademark owner’s products. The Court left this novel question open while signaling that accidental reproduction of a mark may not automatically shield AI developers from trademark liability.
  • Likelihood of confusion: Distorted or modified marks appearing on competing AI-generated outputs can support a likelihood of confusion claim at the pleading stage, even without evidence of actual confusion.
  • Passing off vs. reverse passing off: Dastar does not bar “passing off” claims where AI outputs bear another’s mark; instead, it bars “reverse passing off” claims where a defendant distributes plaintiff’s work without attribution.
  • Famous marks: Trademark dilution claims can survive at the pleading stage where the plaintiff pleads specific facts supporting household-name status, including search volume, customer counts, and presence in major publications.
  • Training data risks: Training AI models on watermarked or trademarked content may expose them to trademark liability beyond copyright concerns to the extent models reproduce those marks in their outputs.
  • Post-knowledge inaction: Awareness of trademark reproduction in AI outputs without adequate remediation may strengthen a plaintiff’s case for infringement.
Continue Reading Northern District of California Allows Trademark Claims Against AI To Proceed

On March 20, 2026, the Trump Administration released its National AI Legislative Framework, a seven-section policy document covering children’s safety, energy infrastructure, intellectual property, censorship, innovation, workforce development, and federal preemption of state laws. Guided by a vision of “permissionless innovation” and “minimally burdensome” regulation, the framework’s most consequential provision is in Section III, where the White House states its belief that AI training on copyrighted material does not violate copyright law, but explicitly declines to ask Congress to codify that position, instead deferring the question to the courts and directing Congress not to take any action that would impact the judiciary’s resolution of the issue.

Continue Reading The White House AI Framework for Fair Use and Why the Courts May Get There First

One of the most valuable AI companies in the world may have just accidentally given away one of its crown jewels and immediately turned to copyright law to limit the damage. On March 31, 2026, Anthropic accidentally exposed the source code for Claude Code, one of its most valuable AI products. The company issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests that removed over 8,000 copies of the leaked code from GitHub. However, within hours of the leak, and before those takedown requests could be processed, a developer used AI to translate the entire codebase into a new Python repository that became the fastest-growing in GitHub history. This all comes at a time when AI companies are relying heavily on fair use as a defense in their mounting copyright infringement lawsuits over their use of copyrighted works to train their models, and as courts have made it clear that copyright law does not recognize AI as an author. This article examines how copyright law applies to AI-generated works and what the AI Code leak reveals about the tensions at the heart of AI and intellectual property.

Continue Reading AI Code Leak Exposes the Fault Lines of Copyright

As AI continues to advance at a rapid pace, two notable foreign players have emerged: DeepSeek and Qwen. These powerful AI models, developed by a Chinese lab and Alibaba, respectively, have garnered attention for their impressive capabilities and potential to disrupt the AI industry. However, alongside their technological prowess comes a host of privacy concerns that warrant closer examination. This article delves into the privacy pitfalls associated with these AI models and explores the implications for users and the broader AI ecosystem.

Continue Reading Privacy Pitfalls in AI: A Closer Look at DeepSeek and Qwen

Takeaways

  • Human Authorship is Essential for Copyright Protection
  • AI as an Assistive Tool Does Not Negate Copyright Eligibility
  • Transparency in Disclosures is Crucial

The U.S. Copyright Office has released Part 2 of its comprehensive report on AI, delving into the complex issue of copyrightability for works created using generative AI systems. This eagerly anticipated report addresses the fundamental questions surrounding human authorship, creative control, and copyright protection in an era of rapidly advancing AI technologies. As generative AI continues to reshape creative industries, the Copyright Office’s findings provide crucial guidance on how existing copyright law applies to AI-assisted and AI-generated works.

In its report, the Copyright Office reaffirms several fundamental principles while providing clarity on how existing copyright law applies to works involving AI. Key findings from the report include

Continue Reading The Future of Creativity: U.S. Copyright Office Clarifies Copyrightability of AI-Generated Works