copyright – Duane Morris TechLaw

November 24, 2025 by Duane Morris

Class Action Litigation Landscape for Gen AI

This year has been a busy one in the generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) class action litigation landscape. New pleadings were filed, including several new class actions, several consolidated and amended complaints, and one appeal. Several key decisions were issued, including a trio that formed a three-way split of authority on how to determine whether training a gen AI model on copyrighted materials constitutes “fair use” under the Copyright Act. Additionally, one humongous settlement was reached.

Read the full article by Justin Donoho.

November 18, 2025 by Duane Morris

Can AI Creations Be Copyrighted? Supreme Court Could Decide

By Mark Lerner

Following a refusal to grant a copyright registration to Stephen Thaler for a work whose sole author was identified as “Creativity Machine,” a generative AI Thaler created, the D.C. Circuit affirmed that works authored exclusively by artificial intelligence are ineligible for copyright protection under the Copyright Act, which the court read to require human authorship, in keeping with the Copyright Office interpretation and prior case law. A petition for certiorari and a supporting amicus brief now ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the question of whether the Copyright Act requires human authorship, arguing that the statute’s text, structure and purpose do not categorically impose such a requirement and that existing doctrines leave room for AI to be recognized as the author of protected works.

Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris website.

July 2, 2025July 2, 2025 by Duane Morris

How Are Courts Approaching Copyrighted Materials and Artificial Intelligence?

Two groundbreaking decisions from the Northern District of California—Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. and Bartz v. Anthropic PBC—shed light on how courts are approaching the use of copyrighted materials in training large language models (LLMs). Both cases involved authors alleging copyright infringement based on the use of their books to train generative AI models, and both courts held that use of the copyrighted materials to train the AI models was transformative. The court in Anthropic held, however, that copying pirated books constitutes copyright infringement and the transformative nature of the use did not rescue such infringement. Conversely, the Meta court held that copying from pirate sites to train AI is fair use, but only because the plaintiffs failed to submit evidence of market harm, which the court believed to be the most relevant factor. As such, while use of copyrighted works to train AI may be fair use, copying works without permission carries the risk of infringement. Read the full Alert on the Duane Morris website.

March 13, 2025March 13, 2025 by Duane Morris

Artificial Intelligence Tools and Copyright Infringement Issues During the Training Process

Duane Morris attorneys Jennifer Lantz, Jeremy Elman and Max DiBaise authored the Bloomberg Law article, “Generative AI Training Case Flags Competition as Major Factor,” exploring what the Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence decision’s novel application of the “fair use” defense of copyright law means for generative AI training.

Companies must be mindful of the ultimate purpose of new artificial intelligence tools to avoid running into copyright infringement issues during the training process. If widely adopted, the Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence decision suggests “intermediate copying” cases are unlikely to provide a strong defense when the final output of a tool mirrors the products it was trained on. Accordingly, the key question is likely to what extent the AI system is competing with the underlying copyrighted work. The further away the system is, the more likely it is to be protected under the fair-use doctrine. Read the full article on the Bloomberg Law website.

September 23, 2024September 23, 2024 by Duane Morris

How Copyright Law Regards Artificial Intelligence

Duane Morris partner Agatha Liu is quoted in the Bloomberg Law article, “AI Art Appeal’s Procedural Flaws Put Broader Ruling in Doubt.”

An appeals court panel’s focus on procedural issues in a case involving efforts to copyright AI-generated work left attorneys concerned the judges may sidestep larger questions about how copyright law regards the emerging technology. […]

“The point of copyright protection is it should reward creativity. It should be associated with a human being, not a machine,” said Liu. “But there’s merit in claiming the creator of the machine being an author.”

Read the full article on the Bloomberg Law website.

October 25, 2023 by Duane Morris

Artificial Intelligence Updates – 10.25.23

#HelloWorld. October swirls with AI headlines, but one senses a running-to-stand-still quality. Like the opening moves in a chess game, players continue to arrange regulatory and litigation pieces on the board, but the first true clash still awaits. Let’s stay smart together.

Read more on The Artificial Intelligence Blog.

October 3, 2023 by Duane Morris

A Discussion with the Copyright Office and UPSTO on Where AI Policy Is Headed

Duane Morris partner Agatha Liu will be moderating the California Lawyers Association webinar “Where Our AI Policy Is Headed – A Discussion with the Copyright Office and the Patent and Trademark Office” on October 26, 2023, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Pacific.

For more information and to register, please visit the CLA website.

September 29, 2023 by Duane Morris

Webinar: Benefits, Risks and Mitigation Strategies for AI Use

Duane Morris is hosting the webinar Get Smart with AI: Best Practices for Using AI in Business on Tuesday, October 17, 2023, from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

Register for the webinar or read more about the program.

September 19, 2023September 18, 2023 by Duane Morris

A Gentle Primer on Generative AI Art Models

Duane Morris partner Aleksander J. Goranin authored the Art Business News article, “The Future of Digital Art as Training Material For Generative Artificial Intelligence Models,” which provides a reader-friendly introduction to the copyright and right-of-publicity issues raised by such AI model training, and offers practical tips about what art owners can do, currently, if they want to keep their works away from such training uses. Read the full article.

August 29, 2023August 29, 2023 by Duane Morris

And the Copyright Registration Goes to… the AI Algorithm or the Machine?

The Copyright Registration Guidance published by the United States Copyright Office in March mainly addressed whether a human providing simple prompts or other input to an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm could obtain a copyright registration for the output that the AI algorithm generated based on the human input. … Now a few months later, a court has handed out a decision on whether to grant a copyright registration to the AI algorithm in Thaler v. Perlmutter, 1:22-cv-01564 (D.D.C).

Read the full post on the Artificial Intelligence Blog.