Intellectual Property Law and Copyright Laws

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.

Intellectual property due diligence often gets relegated to a final checklist item in acquisitions, but this approach can lead to costly oversights. Jason Balich explores why IP assessment should receive the same early, strategic attention as financial analysis, and provides a framework for evaluating whether a target company's patents, trademarks, and trade secrets are properly secured and enforceable.

Under the America Invents Act, what qualifies as prior art is measured against a claimed invention’s effective filing date. 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)(1) encompasses inventions “patented, described in a printed publication, or in public use, on sale, or otherwise available to the public” before that date, and § 102(a)(2) adds U.S. patents and published applications that name another inventor and were effectively filed earlier.