On April 8, Paramount Pictures succeeded in having a lawsuit dismissed involving the 2022 hit movie Top Gun: Maverick. The plaintiffs alleged that the new movie borrowed excessively from a 1983 magazine article that had sparked the original “Top Gun” movie. Judge Percy Anderson of Los Angeles issued a 14-page ruling that the sequel did not show “substantial similarity” to Ehud Yonay’s original article “Top Guns,” which appeared in California Magazine. The article detailed the lives of pilots at the U.S. Navy’s elite fighter pilot school in San Diego, which is the basis of the original and sequ ..read more

Millions of people enjoy games regularly, whether doing their daily crossword puzzles or regular games of Scrabble. Many of these same people have added Wordle to their routine, often posting their results online. The game gives players six attempts to guess a five-letter word, with feedback provided in the form of colored tiles after each guess to indicate when letters match or occupy the correct position. Created by software engineer Josh Wardle in 2021, the game quickly became popular for its simplicity and the fun challenge of solving a new puzzle daily. Purchased by the New York Times in ..read more

Celebrity tattoo artist Kat von D has done body art for thousands of paying clients, and she also appeared on TLC’s tattoo reality shows Miami Ink and LA Ink. Her high profile likely led to the copyright infringement case involving her work recreating a 1989 photographic portrait of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis putting his finger to his lips, seemingly telling everyone to keep quiet. Photographer Jeffrey Sedlik registered the copyright for the iconic image in 1994 and has earned a steady income from licensing its use for t-shirts, prints, and even tattoos. His suit claimed that Kat Von D (real n ..read more

I have spent recent months talking about cases involving AI developers’ use of preexisting content for training their platforms. The plaintiff in these cases often is a group of copyright owners, e.g., visual artists or writers. That paradigm decidedly shifted when the New York Times filed suit against OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT and other AI platforms) and Microsoft (an OpenAI investor), claiming their AI was using millions of news stories without permission. This is the first of what is likely to be several major media organizations taking action to protect its’ content or get paid for its us ..read more

AI appropriation of intellectual property is the biggest issue in IP law right now. While we recently focused on a group of published authors, we now follow up on an August post focusing on claims made by illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz. On November 29, 2023, the artists amended their lawsuit previously struck down in court and added seven more artists (H. Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye and Adam Ellis) to an amended class action case involving Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt, along with new defendant R ..read more

In August, we wrote about how DALL-E 2, Microsoft Image Creator and other artificial intelligence technology use visual artists and photographers’ work to learn how to generate images based on user prompts. This high-stakes question of whether the unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train AI is legal is not confined to visual images. While there are multiple AI training lawsuits against such companies as Google and Stability AI, comedian and author Sarah Silverman and writers Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey made headlines when they filed two suits in the same court in July 2023. One ..read more

Nespresso filed a trademark infringement lawsuit 2022 alleging that Peet’s Coffee had mimicked Nespresso’s trademarked coffee cartridges. A subsidiary of Nestle, Nespresso manufactures and sells coffee cartridges and the machines that use them. Peet’s is a California-based national retail coffee shop chain that also sells retail products, including cartridges, beans, tea, and related products. Nespresso claims that Peet’s caused brand confusion among consumers by creating a false association with its brand and improperly advertised their cartridges as compatible with Nespresso machines. Nespre ..read more

Popular grocery store chain Trader Joe’s has filed a trademark lawsuit against a cryptocurrency platform operating as “Trader Joe.” The retailer alleges that the decentralized exchange (DEX) platform deliberately uses the name in reference to the 50-year-old supermarket chain — the domain name is traderjoexyz.com. It claims the platform capitalizes on the retailer’s name, goodwill, and brand recognition. The chain further argues the connection in the lawsuit by pointing out that the Trader Joe platform uses “confusingly similar” names on the exchange’s website, YouTube page, Reddit, GitHu ..read more

The 160,000 SAG-AFTRA (The Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) members on strike have much in common with the already striking 11,000 scriptwriters. They are all concerned that AI will replace them, which can create scripts and generate likenesses of actors. Many see the remarkable advances made by AI as an existential threat to their profession. The striking actors are trying to protect and capitalize on their right to publicity. The issues for actors The list of Hollywood A-list stars is relatively short and ever-changing, depending on who’s hot. W ..read more

AI system DALL-E 2, Microsoft Image Creator and others enable users to create realistic images and visual art. The user enters a series of prompts and then gets an image. OpenAI, which also made Chat-GPT, created the system. The art generator can create new works based on the prompts or edit physical artwork. The user need not have any art skills to obtain quick results. The user can also easily change the prompts to alter the image. The system uses current art to help it distinguish between styles and techniques. There are concerns over the use of art to train the AI system. AI’s usage of pre ..read more