Warhol Case Could ‘Rein Back' Courts On Transformative Use: Counsel

The Board dismissed this petition for cancellation of Roman Atwood's registration for the mark SMILE MORE for various goods (stickers, backpacks, shirts) and for retail store service featuring clothing, denying petitioner's claim that the term fails to function as a mark.

Universal Music Group's lawsuit against DistroKid raises a critical question about AI disclosure in consumer markets: when does the use of artificial intelligence become material information that must be disclosed to consumers? The case centers on allegations that DistroKid distributed mass-generated AI music while creating the impression it was created by legitimate human artists, potentially violating existing consumer protection laws even without specific AI disclosure requirements.

On Oct. 7, 2026, at 18:00 UTC, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will publish every new generic top-level domain (gTLD) application proceeding in the 2026 new gTLD Round, including who applied...

The U.S. Copyright Office recently released a report on the human authorship requirement for materials to qualify for copyright protection.

The U.S. government has filed a Statement of Interest of the United States of America under 28 U.S.C. § 517 in the Southern District of New York multidistrict litigation over OpenAI’s use of copyrighted works to train large language models. The filing appears to be the federal government’s first direct intervention in the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) training copyright cases, and it advises the court to treat model training (separate from use of AI to generate outputs) on copyrighted text standing alone as a highly transformative fair use under current law.

There was a significant ruling in the Doe v. Github case involving training of AI code generator models on open source. The United States Court of Appeals for The Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court ruling dismissing part of an action brought under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) by programmers against GitHub, Inc., and other defendants. The issues centered on whether defendants removed copyright management information (CMI) from content used to train the AI code generator models.

Is this AI-generated, or is it real? As generative AI tools have become increasingly capable of creating realistic images, videos, and audio, they have also made it easier to impersonate real people without their consent. In response, states are increasingly adopting laws that impose civil and criminal liability for certain AI-generated content that replicates an individual’s identity, likeness, voice, or other personal attributes.

A business decides to file a trademark. Someone on the team searches for a familiar online legal-services brand, clicks the first result, and lands on a site with a similar-sounding name, a polished design, five-star reviews, and a low flat fee. The application gets filed. Months later the business learns the “service” was not who they thought it was, the filing was signed by someone with no authority to sign it, and the USPTO has suspended the application along with hundreds or thousands of others from the same shop.

In recent video game news, gaming giant Nintendo filed and settled a lawsuit against the developers of the popular Nintendo Switch emulator, Yuzu.

The Ninth Circuit held that GitHub Copilot's AI-generated code did not violate DMCA's copyright management information (CMI) removal provisions, even when output resembled source code, because the system generated new works through probabilistic patterns rather than retrieving and stripping information from existing copies. This decision establishes a critical distinction between AI systems that learn and generate versus those that retrieve and reproduce, with significant implications for how courts evaluat

Designed for busy in-house counsel, compliance professionals, and anti-corruption lawyers, this newsletter summarizes some of the most important international anti-corruption law and enforcement...

On 30 September 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) circulated for public comment the Measures on the Administration of Data Security in the Industry and Information Technology Sector

On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed into law the BIOSECURE Act as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which is the U.S. Congress's annual defense policy bill.

Japan is widely perceived as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. In 2020, Transparency International ranked Japan as the 19th least corrupt country out of 180 countries in...

A recent proposal issued by Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, along with various other current private- and public-sector initiatives, signals a strong interest in promoting investment in and the growth...

On May 27, 2019, the Japanese government published amended rules[1] that aim to tighten the regulatory requirements applicable to foreign direct investment (tai nai chokusetsu toshi or FDI)

The new Enterprise Bankruptcy Law of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (Bankruptcy Law) was adopted on August 27, 2006 and will take effect on June 1, 2007, superseding the 1986-enacted Enterprise Bankruptcy Law (Trial) 1986, governing the bankruptcy of State-owned Enterprises . The Bankruptcy Law offers for the first time a unified regime applicable to all types of enterprises in China and also provides a more robust and detailed regime for enforcement of creditors’ claims. We discuss below

On June 30, 2017, the Wuhan Intermediate People's Court (the "Wuhan Court") issued a decision recognizing and enforcing a civil money judgment issued by the Los Angeles Superior Court arising out of...

On 25 July 2018, the European Commission ("the Commission") published its decision on the Altice/PT Portugal gun jumping case. The Commission concluded that various contractual clauses allowed Altice N.V. ("Altice") ...

Like the COVID-19 virus, COVID-related contract claims have not gone away. In "Contracting in the Fog of War: Recovering Costs Caused by an Epidemic," we reported on Pernix Serka Joint Venture v. Department...