With so much attention being given to the legal issues that AI-powered technologies are generating, it can be easy to overlook or underestimate the importance of long-standing legal issues having nothing to do with artificial intelligence. While it would be neither possible nor particularly useful to catalog all of them in a single blog post,…

The United States Supreme Court has put an end to Stephen Thaler’s crusade for machine rights. Okay, that’s the sensational news article way of putting it.  He wasn’t really crusading for machine rights. He was trying to establish a precedent for claiming copyright in AI-generated works.
I first wrote about this back in May, 2022…

On December 11, 2025, President Trump issued another Executive Order. This one is intended to promote “national dominance” in “a race with adversaries for supremacy.” To “win,” the Order says, AI companies should not be encumbered by state regulation. “The policy of the United States,” the Order says, is “to sustain and enhance the…

Painting of Nipper by Francis Barraud (1898-99); subsequently used as a trademark with “HIs Master’s Voice.”

Lehrman v. Lovo, Inc.

On July 10, 2025, the federal district court for the Southern District of New York issued an Order granting in part and denying in part a motion to dismiss a putative class action lawsuit that…

Just days after the first major fair use ruling in a generative-AI case, a second court has determined that using copyrighted works to train AI is fair use. Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, No. 3:23-cv-03417-VC (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025).

The Kadrey v. Meta Platforms Lawsuit

I previously wrote about this lawsuit here…

A federal judge has issued a landmark fair use decision in a generative-AI copyright infringement lawsuit.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about the fair use decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS. As I explained there, that case involved a search-and-retrieval AI system, so the holding was not determinative of fair use…

In 2019, Stephen Thaler developed an AI system he called The Creativity Machine. He generated output he called A Recent Entrance to Paradise. When he applied to register a copyright claim in the output, he listed the machine as the author. He claimed ownership of the work as a work made for hire. In his…