Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Copyright, AI, and Meta’s Torrent Problem
"Move fast and break things." Mark Zuckerberg's famous motto seems especially apt when examining how Meta developed Llama, its flagship AI model. Like OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others, Meta faces copyright lawsuits for using massive amounts of copyrighted material to train its large language models (LLMs). However, the claims against Meta go further. In Kadrey v. Meta, the plaintiffs allege that Meta didn't just scrape data — it pirated it, using BitTorrent to pull hundreds of terabytes...
D.C. Court of Appeals Reaffirms Human Authorship Requirement in Thaler v. Perlmutter
In 2019, Stephen Thaler filed an unusual copyright application. Instead of submitting traditional artwork, the piece—titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise” (image at top)—identified an unusual “creator”: the “Creativity Machine.” The Creativity Machine is an AI system invented by Thaler. In his application for registration, Thaler informed the Copyright Office that the work was “created autonomously by machine,” and he claimed the copyright based on his “ownership of the machine.” After...
A Podcast on Oracle v. Google (courtesy of NotebookLM)
In October 2024 I created (probably not the right word - delivered?) a podcast using NotebookLM: An Experiment: An AI Generated Podcast on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law. The podcast that NotebookLM created was quite good, so I thought I'd try another one. This is in the nature of experimentation, simply to explore this unusual AI tool. This time the topic is the Oracle v. Google copyright litigation. I thought this would be a good topic to experiment with, since it is a complex...
SDNY Courts Split Over Copyright Management Information in AI Cases
In my recent post—Postscript to my AI Series – Why Not Use the DMCA?—I discussed early developments in two cases pending against OpenAI in the U.S. District Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Both cases focus on the claim that in the process of training its AI models, OpenAI illegally removed "copyright management information." And, as I discuss below, they reach different outcomes. What Is Copyright Management Information? Many people who are familiar with...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer