Intellectual Property

Jason M. Allen, an artist whose AI-generated image won a digital art competition prize in 2022, recently sued the U.S. Copyright Office for rejecting his application for copyright of the image. In its refusal to grant copyright protection to Allen’s work—which he created using 624 prompts on the generative AI platform Midjourney—the Copyright Office argued that the artist’s creative process to generate the award-winning image did not meet the criteria for “human authorship as we understand it.”

Congress should pass an amended version of the NO FAKES Act that preempts all existing and future state digital likeness laws. This would ensure consistent IP protections for all Americans—including performers—support innovation in entertainment, and prevent a patchwork of state digital replica laws.

Congress and other stakeholders would do well to ignore SOPA as a relic of the past and instead focus on those stakeholders who want to engage on the substantial and growing body of evidence from around the world.

A landmark ruling in 2015 made it harder for artists and record labels to determine where permissible influence and interpolation become impermissible appropriation and plagiarism. Congress should make things more consistent, accurate, and fair by directing the Copyright Office to launch a competition for the private sector to come up with an AI-enabled tool to compare how similar a musical composition or recording is to existing copyright-protected works.

A recent paper found that the average innovative target firm received a takeover premium and cumulative abnormal stock returns that were 4.2 and 5.6 percentage points, respectively, higher than their non-innovative counterparts.

The Center for Data Innovation submitted comments to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent body set up to uphold information rights, on its generative AI consultation.

A new working paper estimates that cross-border patenting from the Global North to the Global South would have been about 43 percent lower in the absence of globalization.

A new working paper indicates that a 1 percent increase in the number of patent applications is associated with a decrease in carbon emissions of about 0.08 percent.

Hodan Omaar speaks at the 2024 State of the Net Conference on a panel about artificial intelligence and creativity in the arts.

The United States should not endorse an IPR waiver in the WHO Pandemic Preparedness Agreement. It would not increase the number of vaccines or therapeutics, or the global supply that might be needed to address a future global pandemic.