Mass Law Blog
Intellectual property and business litigation, Massachusetts and nationallyWritten by humans
Lee Gesmer’s Mass Law Blog began in 2005, and contains almost 600 posts. The site initially focused on Massachusetts law, but today it follows business and intellectual property law nation-wide. The site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm represents startup and established companies in the areas of litigation, transactions (including financings, mergers and acquisitions), IP rights, taxation, employment law, standards consortia, business counseling and open source development projects and foundations. You can find a summary of the firm’s services here. To learn how Gesmer Updegrove can help you, contact: Lee Gesmer
Supreme Court Showdown Over National Security and Free Speech
I've been belatedly reading Chris Miller's Chip War, so I'm particularly attuned to U.S.-China relations around technology. Of course, the topic of Miller's excellent book is advanced semiconductor chips, not social media apps. Nevertheless, the topic now occupying the attention of the Supreme Court and the president elect is the national security threat presented by a social media app used by an estimated 170 million U.S. users. With Miller's book as background I was interested when, on...
A Postscript to my AI Series – Why Not Use the DMCA?
After reading my 3-part series on copyright and LLMs (start with Part 1, here) a couple of colleagues have asked me whether content owners could use the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to challenge the use of their copyright-protected content. I'll provide a short summary of the law on this issue, but the first thing to note is that the DMCA offers two potential avenues for content owners: Section 512(c)'s widely-used 'notice and takedown' system and the lesser-known Section...
Copyright and the Challenge of Large Language Models (Part 3)
In the first two parts of this series I examined how large language models (LLMs) work and analyzed whether their training process can be justified under copyright law's fair use doctrine. (Part 1, Part 2). However, I also noted that LLMs sometimes "memorize" content during the training stage and then "regurgitate" that content verbatim or near-verbatim when the model is accessed by users. The "memorization/regurgitation" issue is featured prominently in The New York Times Company v. Microsoft...
Copyright And The Challenge of Large Language Models (Part 2)
"Fair use is the great white whale of American copyright law. Enthralling, enigmatic, protean, it endlessly fascinates us even as it defeats our every attempt to subdue it." - Paul Goldstein __________________________ This is the second in a 3-part series of posts on Large Language Models (LLMs) and copyright. (Part 1 here) In this post I'll turn to a controversial and important legal question: does the use of copyrighted material in training LLMs for generative AI constitute fair use? This...
This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts. You can find a summary of our services here. To learn how GU can help you, contact:
Lee Gesmer