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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

A status check on the state of artificial intelligence regulation in the U.S.

Takeaways

  • Executive Order 14365 has so far not brought any clarity or consistency to U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) regulations.
  • No U.S. state AI laws have been challenged or overturned (yet).
  • Businesses should be careful about not overcorrecting to early federal pressure on AI regulations. Even if they are overturned, organizations would still have consumer protection, anti-bias, and anti-discrimination obligations that state regulators and Attorneys General will enforce in the AI context through other mechanisms.

OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023. By then, it was already the fastest-growing software application in the history of the human race. Artificial intelligence had already been deployed across many businesses, but the rapid proliferation of large language models into everyday life transformed AI regulation from a niche concern into the top priority of legislative sessions nationwide. There was a scramble to regulate and then understand (in that order) this new technology, resulting in over-drafted measures followed by industry pushback and a subsequent contraction due to the chilling effect that reactionary regulation can have on business investment.[1]

Continue Reading The Curious Case of Executive Order 14365’s Impact on AI Regulation

Takeaways

  • The CCPA Dives Into Internal Governance. The new amendments introduce three major regulatory pillars: new requirements for Automated Decision-Making Technology (ADMT), mandatory annual cybersecurity audits, and a requirement for businesses to conduct pre-processing data protection risk assessments.
  • ADMT. The CCPA has adopted pre-notice, risk assessment, consumer opt-out, and access obligations, as have been found in more recent privacy laws, with regard to automated decision-making and profiling.
  • Mandatory Executive Oversight. Members of a business’s executive management team are now directly responsible for overseeing the new mandatory cybersecurity audits and risk assessments and are responsible for making the necessary related certifications to the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA).
  • Phased Compliance Deadlines. The new regulations will likely be effective within the next four months and have compliance deadlines extending from 2027 through 2030.

Summary

After a tortured process taking years, the California Privacy Protection Agency has finalized the long-awaited amendments to the CCPA Regulations. The final package of regulations, now spanning more than 100 pages, is pending final review by the California Office for Administrative Law (OAL). If the OAL files the regulations by August 31, 2025, they will take effect on October 1, 2025. If the filing occurs between September 1 and November 30, the regulations will take effect on January 1, 2026.

Continue Reading New CCPA Regulations: Culture Change and the Rise of the ex ante Framework

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

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was punished by Hades for cheating death (twice) by forcing him to roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down every time it neared the top. AI stakeholders know the feeling. Attempting to keep pace with the downpour of artificial intelligence-related regulation, guidance, rules and requirements emerging over the past two years feels like a mythical challenge.

At any point in time, there are 50 U.S. states, five inhabited territories, the White House, a federal district, a dozen federal agencies, a hundred-odd state agencies and a couple thousand municipalities all tackling the same question: what are the rules for a safe, legal and generally non-evil deployment of artificial intelligence tools?

Different regulators have come up with different answers to that question. What have they focused on so far?

Continue Reading Understanding Trends in AI Legislation

Colorado just became the first U.S. state to pass a law (Senate Bill 24-205 “SB 24-205” or the “CAIA”) regulating consumer harms arising out of artificial intelligence (“AI”). While the CAIA will not go into effect until February 2026, it is part of a growing trend in the U.S., including, most notably, the White House’s guidance on “Algorithmic Discrimination Protections” published at the end of 2023.

Continue Reading Colorado’s Artificial Intelligence Act (CAIA) – The First U.S. State Law Regulating Consumer Harms Arising Out of AI

That whistling sound you hear may not be an old-school newspaper walking past a graveyard—it may well be an AI industry-killing asteroid. On December 27, 2023, the New York Times filed a groundbreaking suit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The Times alleged copyright infringement, vicarious copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition on removing copyright management, unfair competition, and trademark dilution. The 69-page, 204-paragraph complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges, among many other things, that:

Continue Reading Will the New York Times Take Down Large Language Models?