Money-Saving Licensing Tips for Startups
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
PODCAST: PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
A Counterintuitive Approach to Winning Without Litigation: One-on-One with Haley Morrison
SkadBytes Podcast | Tech’s Shifting Landscape: Five Trends Shaping the Conversation
Tips for Conducting a Trade Secret Assessment with Rob Jensen
Will I Get Sued if I Create Another Hospital Drama? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
Essential Steps to Sell Your Business
Mickey Mouse: un ratón con abogado
(Podcast) The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
Unexpected Paths to IP Law with Dan Young and Colin White
Why Can't I Clean the Graffiti Off My Walls? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
(Podcast) The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - NCAA Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) Update – Effects of House Settlement
How IP Can Fuel Your Startup's Growth
Tariffs and Trade Series: What Senior Management Teams Need to Know
5 Key Takeaways | AI and Your Patent Management, Strategy & Portfolio
Two Key Considerations in NIL Deals
Another federal court recently ruled that using copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems can qualify as fair use under the U.S. Copyright Act. This time, the court said that, because the issue of market...more
As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies increasingly generate content, designs, code, inventions, and even music, businesses face a pressing legal question: who owns the output when a machine creates it? The legal...more
The recent federal court finding—that using copyrighted books to train an AI large language model (LLM) qualifies as fair use—provides some guidance for companies developing or deploying generative AI systems and for...more
On June 11, 2025, Disney and several affiliated production companies filed a federal lawsuit against Midjourney, Inc., a leading artificial intelligence (AI) image-generation platform. The suit alleges “calculated and...more
In the space of forty-eight hours, two judges of the Northern District of California issued detailed, partially contrasting opinions on whether large language model (“LLM”) training that copies entire books without...more
The Walt Disney Company and Universal City Studios Productions are among the latest plaintiffs to bring a lawsuit against an artificial intelligence (AI) developer....more
What Is Copyright Protection? When Should A Copyright Be Filed? What is copyright? Copyright is a United States Constitutional right that provides protection to works of original authorship...more
A recent ruling from the United States District Court for the District of Central California in the lawsuit against Miley Cyrus and others for the song “Flowers” highlighted the power that a single copyright co-owner holds in...more
Ninth Circuit affirms dismissal of copyright infringement claim against musician Lil Nas X, finding that mere availability of plaintiff influencer’s photographs on Instagram does not amount to access to those photographs and...more
On May 9, 2025, the United States Copyright Office (the USCO) released a 108-page report on whether the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems is defensible as a...more
No matter what type of business you are in, trademark and copyright law can have significant effects on success and growth of your business. Both of these areas of law provide important rights over the intellectual property...more
Given that litigation in the United States can take years from start to finish, we rarely see a conclusion to the cases we follow. In a prior blog post, we looked at the potential recusal requirements of the U.S. Supreme...more
Dr. Stephen Thaler’s attempts to obtain intellectual property protection for artificial intelligence were once again shot down by the courts, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia affirmed that the...more
AT A GLANCE - On March 18, 2025, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed decisions by a lower court and the United States Copyright Office that human authorship is required to...more
Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976? In a March 18, 2025 precedential opinion, a D.C. Circuit panel affirmed prior determinations from the D.C. District Court and the Copyright Office that an...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed the Copyright Office’s position that artificial intelligence cannot be an author under the Copyright Act....more
On March 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in the Thaler v. Perlmutter case, which confirmed the refusal of copyright registration for a work created entirely by an artificial...more
On March 18, 2025 the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Stephen Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter et al., confirming that U.S. law requires human authorship. Specifically, the question presented to the Court was “can a...more
In its ruling in the case Cyril E. Vetter, Et Al. v. Robert Resnik, No. 23-1369-SDD-EWD (M.D. La. Jan. 29, 2025), the US District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana ruled that the US songwriter-plaintiff Vetter...more
In this edition of The Precedent, we outline the recent federal circuit decision in Bitmanagement Software GmbH v. United States (Fed. Cir. Jan. 7, 2025)....more
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit explained that to be a derivative work, a program interoperative with another must actually incorporate aspects of the underlying work. The Court further ruled that licensees of a...more
In a summary order, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s orders in a case involving an ownership dispute over the copyrights to certain compositions by Parliament-Funkadelic bandleader...more
While the question of fair use has dominated much of the discussion on whether copyrighted material can be used to train AI models, of equal importance are questions involving the application of the Digital Millennium...more
Structured Asset Sales, LLC v. Sheeran, No. 18-cv-5839 (2d Cir. Nov. 1, 2024) - On November 1, 2024, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s entry of summary judgment that Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud (“TOL”)...more