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
Reddit v. Anthropic: Contract Law as the New Frontier in AI Data Governance
At the heart of large language model (LLM) technology lies a deceptively simple triad: compute, algorithms, and data. Compute powers training - vast arrays of graphics processing units crunching numbers at a scale measured in billions of parameters and trillions of tokens. Algorithms shape the intelligence - breakthroughs like the Transformer architecture enable models to understand, predict, and generate human-like text. Data is the raw material, the fuel that teaches the models everything...
Did a Landmark AI-Copyright Report Trigger a Political Purge?
[Update: Perlmutter's challenge to her termination was rejected by a district court judge on July 30, 2025. However, on September 10, 2025 the DC Circuit reversed that ruling and issued an injunction ordering that Perlmutter be reinstated as Register of Copyrights: In sum, all of the preliminary-injunction factors weigh in favor of granting an injunction pending appeal. Perlmutter has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of her claim that the President’s attempt to remove her from her...
Copyright Office Issues Long-Awaited Report on Generative AI Training – Register of Copyrights Is Fired Next Day
The Copyright Office has been engaged in a multi-year study of how copyright law intersects with artificial intelligence. That process culminated in a series of three separate reports: Part 1 - Unauthorized Digital Replicas, Part 2 - Copyrightability, and now, the much-anticipated Part 3—Generative AI Training. Many in the copyright community anticipated that the arrival of Part 3 would be the most important and controversial. It addresses a central legal question in the flood of recent...
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...
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