#infringement litigation

[snickerdoodlles]

*sees this post pop up in my notes*

*twitches*

I’d made some generalizations in that (which I standby, they’re just coming from an opposite direction) but had to break out the sources and numbers when someone told me I was making generalizations in the same way as the people who “””uncovered””” that AO3 was scraped for AI (no) did and anyways I get tempted to post those notes here sometimes before I have to bonk myself on the head and remind myself no one cares

[einfolge1]

Comprehensive Guide to Claim Chart Analysis in Patenting

In the realm of intellectual property (IP) and patent law, claim chart analysis stands as a crucial tool. It serves not only to assert patent rights but also to defend against infringement allegations. By breaking down the claims of a patent and comparing them to prior art, claim chart analysis helps to determine the validity and scope of a patent. This process is essential for both patent holders looking to protect their intellectual property and parties accused of infringing on existing patents.

[nationallawreview]

Arguing Internet Availability to Establish Copyright Infringement Is Bananas

In an unpublished opinion, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision finding that a pro se Californian artist failed to establish that an Italian artist had reasonable opportunity to access the copyrighted work simply because it was available to view on the internet. Morford v. Cattelan, Case No. 23-12263 (11th Cir. Aug. 16, 2024) (Jordan, Pryor,…

[litem-legalis]

What are the key steps a company should take when preparing for trademark litigation to ensure a strong case against an alleged infringer?

When preparing for trademark litigation, a company should take the following key steps to ensure a strong case against an alleged infringer:

Evaluate the Strength of the Trademark: Ensure the trademark is registered and has a strong, distinctive character. Generic or descriptive marks are harder to defend.

Gather Evidence of Use: Collect comprehensive evidence showing the continuous and consistent use of the trademark. This includes advertising materials, sales records, and product packaging that demonstrates the trademark's presence in the market.

Document Infringement: Obtain and preserve evidence of the alleged infringement. This can include photos of the infringing products, copies of advertisements, and samples of the infringing goods or services.

Prove Likelihood of Confusion: Prepare evidence to demonstrate the likelihood of consumer confusion. This may involve surveys, expert testimony, and comparisons of the trademarks in question, focusing on similarities in appearance, sound, meaning, and commercial impression.

Assess Damages: Quantify the financial impact of the infringement. This involves calculating lost sales, damage to brand reputation, and other economic losses attributable to the infringer's actions.

Seek Legal Counsel: Engage an experienced intellectual property attorney who specializes in trademark law. They can provide strategic guidance, handle legal procedures, and represent the company in court.

Send a Cease and Desist Letter: Before proceeding to litigation, send a cease and desist letter to the alleged infringer. This demonstrates a good-faith effort to resolve the issue without court intervention and can sometimes lead to a settlement.

File a Complaint: If the cease and desist letter does not yield a satisfactory response, prepare and file a detailed complaint with the appropriate court. The complaint should outline the trademark's validity, the nature of the infringement, and the relief sought.

Prepare for Discovery: Be ready for the discovery phase by organizing all relevant documents and evidence. This includes responding to the infringer's discovery requests and preparing for depositions.

Maintain Public Relations: Manage public communications carefully to protect the company's reputation during the litigation process.

By following these steps, a company can build a robust case and improve its chances of successfully enforcing its trademark rights against an infringer.

[reasonsforhope]

AI models can seemingly do it all: generate songs, photos, stories, and pictures of what your dog would look like as a medieval monarch. 

But all of that data and imagery is pulled from real humans — writers, artists, illustrators, photographers, and more — who have had their work compressed and funneled into the training minds of AI without compensation. 

Kelly McKernan is one of those artists. In 2023, they discovered that Midjourney, an AI image generation tool, had used their unique artistic style to create over twelve thousand images. 

“It was starting to look pretty accurate, a little infringe-y,” they told The New Yorker last year. “I can see my hand in this stuff, see how my work was analyzed and mixed up with some others’ to produce these images.” 

For years, leading AI companies like Midjourney and OpenAI, have enjoyed seemingly unfettered regulation, but a landmark court case could change that. 

On May 9, a California federal judge allowed ten artists to move forward with their allegations against Stability AI, Runway, DeviantArt, and Midjourney. This includes proceeding with discovery, which means the AI companies will be asked to turn over internal documents for review and allow witness examination. 

Lawyer-turned-content-creator Nate Hake took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to celebrate the milestone, saying that “discovery could help open the floodgates.” 

“This is absolutely huge because so far the legal playbook by the GenAI companies has been to hide what their models were trained on,” Hake explained...

“I’m so grateful for these women and our lawyers,” McKernan posted on X, above a picture of them embracing Ortiz and Andersen. “We’re making history together as the largest copyright lawsuit in history moves forward.” ...

The case is one of many AI copyright theft cases brought forward in the last year, but no other case has gotten this far into litigation. 

“I think having us artist plaintiffs visible in court was important,” McKernan wrote. “We’re the human creators fighting a Goliath of exploitative tech.”

“There are REAL people suffering the consequences of unethically built generative AI. We demand accountability, artist protections, and regulation.” 

-via GoodGoodGood, May 10, 2024

[design-law]

Does this chicken nesting box infringe this design patent? That’s the claim in this recently-filed complaint.

Update, 6/5/23: It looks like the plaintiff has filed a separate complaint, in a different district, where it alleges that Wolltex (the defendant in the first case) “was a sham corporate shield for an individual named Alejandro Canales.”

[globalpatentfilings]

The research methodology used for the research article is Doctrinal as well as non-Doctrinal

[ipandlegalfilings]

In India, for a patent application to be evaluated, a Request for Examination (RFE) must be filed. The patent examiner evaluates the patent application and prepares the First Examination Report (FER) only after the RFE.

[patricia-taxxon]

ai art really obviously doesn't fall under copyright infringement by default. litigating it as such will make everything worse. this is a 100 year old blunder.

[therobotmonster]

Please don’t use midjourney it steals art from pretty much every artist out there without any compensation. I didn’t know this at first and tried it but then during the creation process i saw water marks and Getty image logos (though I’m sure they’ve hidden that now) so it’s definitely stealing.

No, it isn't. And you've taken the wrong lesson from the Getty watermark issue.

AI training on public facing, published work is fair use. Any published piece could be located, examined, and learned from by a human artist. This does not require the permission of the owner of said work. A mechanical apparatus does not change this principle.

All we, as artists, own, are specific expressions. We do not own styles, ideas, concepts, plots, or tropes. We do not even own the work we create in a proper sense. All our work flows from the commons, and all of it flows back to it. IP is a limited patent on specific expressions, and what constitutes infringement is the end result of the creative process. What goes into it is irrelevant, and upending that process to put inspiration and reference as infringement is the end of art as we know it.

The Getty watermark issue is an example of overfitting, wherein a repetitive element in the dataset over-emphasizes specific features to the point of disrupting the system's attempts at the creation of novel images.

No one denies that the SD dataset is trained on images Getty claims to own, but Getty has so polluted the image search functions of the internet with their watermarked images that the idea of a getty watermark has been picked up the same way the AI might pick up the idea of an eye or a tree branch. It is a systemic failure that Shutterstock and Getty can be so monopolistic and ubiquitous that a dateset trained on literally everything public facing on the internet would be polluted with their watermarks.

Watermarks that, by the way, they add to public domain images, and that google prioritizes over clean versions.

The lawsuits being brought against Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are copyright overreach being presented as a theft tissue. The facts of the matter are not as the litigants state. The images aren't stored, the SD weights are a 4 gig file trained on 250 terabytes, roughly 4 bytes per image. It runs local, does not reach out to image sources over IP. All you've got are mathematical patterns and ratios. I would go so far as to say that the class action suit is based on outright lies.

But for a moment, let's entertain the idea that what goes into a work, as inspiration, can be copyrighted. That styles can be stolen. That what goes in defines infringement, rather than what comes out. What happens then?

Well, the bad news is that if Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were shut down tomorrow, Stable Diffusion is in the wild. It runs local, it's user-trainable. In short, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. Plus, the way diffusion AI works, there's no way to trace a gen to its sources. The weights don't work like that. The indexing would be larger than the entire set of stored patterns.

Well good news, there's an AI for that. The current version is called CLIP Interrogator And it works on everything. Not just AI generated, but any image. It can find what style it closely matches, reverse engineer a prompt. It's crude now, but it will improve.

Now, you've already established that using the same patterns as another work is infringement. You've already established that inspiration is theft. And now there's a robot that tells lawyers who you draw like.

Sure, you can fight it in court. If it goes go to court. But who's to say they won't just staplegun that AI to a monetization re-direction bot like youtube has going with their content ID? Awesome T-shirt design you uploaded to your print-on-demand shop... too bad your art style resembles that from a cartoon from 1973 that Universal got as part of an acquisition and they've claimed all your cash. Sure you can file a DMCA counter-notice, but we all know how that goes.

And then there's this fantasy that upending the system would help artists. But who would "own" that style? Is that piece stealing the style of Stephen Silver, or Disney's Kim Possible(TM)? When you work for Disney their contracts say everything you make is theirs. Every doodle. Every drawing. If the styles are copyrightable, a company could hire an artist straight out of school, publish their work under work-for-hire, fire them, and then go after them for "stealing" the style they developed while working for said corp.

Not to mention that a handful of companies own so much media that it is going to be impossible to find an artist that hasn't been influenced by something under their control.

Oh, and that stock of source images that companies like Disney and Universal have? These kinds of lawsuits won't stop them from building AIs with that material that they "own". The power goes into corp hands, they can down staff to their heart's content and everyone else is denied the ability to compete with them. Worst of all possible worlds.

Be careful what wishes you make when holding the copyright monkey's paw.

[einfolge1]

Mastering Patent Infringement Study: Key Insights and Real-Life Cases

In the realm of intellectual property (IP), infringement study play a critical role in protecting innovations and enforcing patent rights. This analysis is essential for businesses, inventors, and legal professionals to avoid legal pitfalls and protect intellectual assets. In this blog, we'll explore the various aspects of the infringement study, its importance, and how real-life cases illustrate its significance.

[theoutcastrogue]

"The majority of high-tech patent lawsuits are brought by patent trolls—companies that exist not to provide products or services, but primarily have a business using patents to threaten others’ work. Some politicians are proposing to make that bad situation worse. ...

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, S. 2140, (PERA), sponsored by Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-DE) would be a huge gift to patent trolls, a few tech firms that aggressively license patents, and patent lawyers. For everyone else, it will be a huge loss. That’s why we’re opposing it, and asking our supporters to speak out as well. 

Patent trolling is still a huge, multi-billion dollar problem that’s especially painful for small businesses and everyday internet users. But, in the last decade, we’ve made modest progress placing limits on patent trolling. The Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Alice v. CLS Bank barred patents that were nothing more than abstract ideas with computer jargon added in. Using the Alice test, federal courts have kicked out a rogue’s gallery of hundreds of the worst patents. 

Under Alice’s clear rules, courts threw out ridiculous patents on “matchmaking”, online picture menus, scavenger hunts, and online photo contests. The nation’s top patent court, the Federal Circuit, actually approved a patent on watching an ad online twice before the Alice rules finally made it clear that patents like that cannot be allowed. The patents on “bingo on a computer?” Gone under Alice. Patents on loyalty programs (on a computer)? Gone. Patents on upselling (with a computer)? All gone. ...

PERA’s attempt to roll back progress goes beyond computer technology. For almost 30 years, some biotech and pharmaceutical companies actually applied for, and were granted, patents on naturally occuring human genes. As a consequence, companies were able to monopolize diagnostic tests that relied on naturally occurring genes in order to help predict diseases such as breast cancer, making such testing far more expensive. The ACLU teamed up with doctors to confront this horrific practice, and sued. That lawsuit led to a historic victory in 2013 when the Supreme Court disallowed patents on human genes found in nature. 

If PERA passes, it will explicitly overturn that ruling, allowing human genes to be patented once again. ...

“To See Your Own Blood, Your Own Genes”

From the 1980s until the 2013 Myriad decision, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted patents on human genomic sequences. If researchers “isolated” the gene—a necessary part of analysis—they would then get a patent that described isolating, or purified, as a human process, and insist they weren’t getting a patent on the natural world itself.

But this concept of patenting an “isolated” gene was simply a word game, and a distinction without a difference. With the genetic patent in hand, the patent-holder could demand royalty payments from any kind of test or treatment involving that gene. And that’s exactly what Myriad Genetic did when they patented the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene sequences, which are important indicators for the prevalence of breast or ovarian cancer. 

Myriad’s patents significantly increased the cost of those tests to U.S. patients. The company even sent some doctors cease and desist letters, saying the doctors could not perform simple tests on their own patients—even looking at the gene sequences without Myriad’s permission would constitute patent infringement. 

This behavior caused pathologists, scientists, and patients to band together with ACLU lawyers and challenge Myriad’s patents. They litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. “A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” the Supreme Court stated in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics. 

A practice like granting and enforcing patents on human genes should truly be left in the dustbin of history. It’s shocking that pro-patent lobbyists have convinced these Senators to introduce legislation seeking to reinstate such patents. Last month, the President of the College of American Pathologists published an op-ed reminding lawmakers and the public about the danger of patenting the human genome, calling gene patents “dangerous to the public welfare.”  

As Lisbeth Ceriani, a breast cancer survivor and a plaintiff in the Myriad case said, “It’s a basic human right to see your own blood, your own genes.” "

[litem-legalis]

What is Licensing? and how can I obtain it?

Trademark Licensing is an official contract where the registered trademark owner grants permission to another party to use the TM symbol under particular conditions. Basically TM Licensing permits the licensee to sell the product or services by using the licensor’s trademark. It helps in expanding a brand reach, enhancing market value and generating revenue without the licensor directly engaging in production or distribution.

To obtain a Trademark License, follow these steps:

Step 1- Identify potential licensors: Research and identify trademark owners whose brands align with the goals and target markets of your business.

Step 2- Negotiate Terms: Talk with the trademark owner about the scope of use, duration, territory, quality control standards, and financial arrangements, such as royalties.

Step 3- Draft and Sign Agreement: Create a comprehensive trademark licensing agreement that clearly outlines the terms and conditions of the agreement with the help of legal professionals. The document should be reviewed and signed by both parties.

Step 4- Comply with Agreement: Ensure compliance with the terms of the agreement, including quality control, usage guidelines, and royalty payments.

When dealing with trademark licensing, it is advisable to consult a legal expert who specializes in intellectual property law.

[venomous-qwille]

Can you please just tell us what is wrong with ai and why, I can't find anything from actual industry artists ect online through Google just tech bro type articles. All the tech articles are saying it's a good thing, and every pro I follow refuses to explain how or why it's bad. How am I supposed to know something if nobody will teach me and I can't find it myself

I'll start by saying that the reason pro artists are refusing to answer questions about this is because they are tired. Like, I dont know if anyone actually understands just how exhausting it is to have to justify over and over again why the tech companies that are stealing your work and actively seeking to destroy your craft are 'bad, actually'.

I originally wrote a very longform reply to this ask, but in classic tumblr style the whole thing got eaten, so. I do not have the spoons to rewrite all that shit. Here are some of the sources I linked, I particularly recommend stable diffusion litigation for a thorough breakdown of exactly how generative tools work and why that is theft.

or this video if you are feeling lazy and only want the art-side opening statements:

Everytime you feed someone's work- their art, their writing, their likeness- into Midjourney or Dall-E or Chat GPT you are feeding this monster.

Go forth and educate yourself.