The past year has provided decades' worth of developments across law and policy in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies. I

The class-action lawsuit seems to be a pushback against Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI’s creation that allegedly doesn’t pay the open-source community their due and harms it in the process.

The LinkedIn posts by Daniel Gervais include information about various legal and intellectual property topics, such as a Sci-Fi & Information Law Essay Competition, a US class action against OpenAI, a notice of inquiry by the Copyright Office regarding AI and copyright law, and a legal sci-fi story titled "Forever" by Daniel Gervais. Additionally, there is a job posting for a WIPO Intangible Assets & Innovation Data Research Fellow and a post-doctoral researcher/research associate position related to the Fair MusE project. Judge Beryl Howell's landmark decision on copyright and AI is also mentioned.

New AI technologies may infringe on others’ copyrights by being deemed infringing derivatives of a copyrighted source they used to generate their output.

A group of legal experts are pressing patent agencies, courts and policymakers to address the question as generative A.I. seems on the brink of invading another uniquely human endeavor.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has stated that AI models cannot hold patents. This decision has implications for the future of patent law and intellectual property rights in the context of AI technology.

The USPTO has announced that AI-assisted inventions can be patented if a human provides a significant contribution, including being an inventive prompter. The guidance instructs examiners to apply the "significant contribution" test to determine inventorship. The full official guidance will be released tomorrow. This policy measure aims to incentivize innovation and leverage the capabilities of generative AI.

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are being sued for allegedly violating copyright law by reproducing open-source code using AI. But the suit could have a huge impact on the wider world of artificial intelligence.

Are text-to-image AI legal? It’s a hard question to answer.

Existing foundation models are trained on copyrighted material. Deploying these models can pose both legal and ethical risks when data creators fail to receive appropriate attribution or compensation. In the United States and several other countries, copyrighted content may be used to build foundation models without incurring liability due to the fair use doctrine. However, there is a caveat: If the model produces output that is similar to copyrighted data, particularly in scenarios that affect the market of that data, fair use may no longer apply to the output of the model. In this work, we emphasize that fair use is not guaranteed, and additional work may be necessary to keep model development and deployment squarely in the realm of fair use. First, we survey the potential risks of developing and deploying foundation models based on copyrighted content. We review relevant U.S. case law, drawing parallels to existing and potential applications for generating text, source code, and visual art. Experiments confirm that popular foundation models can generate content considerably similar to copyrighted material. Second, we discuss technical mitigations that can help foundation models stay in line with fair use. We argue that more research is needed to align mitigation strategies with the current state of the law. Lastly, we suggest that the law and technical mitigations should co-evolve. For example, coupled with other policy mechanisms, the law could more explicitly consider safe harbors when strong technical tools are used to mitigate infringement harms. This co-evolution may help strike a balance between intellectual property and innovation, which speaks to the original goal of fair use. But we emphasize that the strategies we describe here are not a panacea and more work is needed to develop policies that address the potential harms of foundation models.

Two U.S. authors sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company misused their works to "train" its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.