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
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...
An Experiment: An AI Generated Podcast on Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law
Google's NotebookLM has been getting a lot of attention. You upload your sources (articles, Youtube videos, URLs, text documents, audio files) and NotebookLM can create a podcast based on the library you've created. I thought I'd experiment with this a bit. I uploaded a variety of articles on copyright and AI and hit "go." I didn't give NotebookLM the subject or any prompts. It figured out the topic (correctly) and created the 11 minute podcast embedded below. A few observations: First, the...
Anderson v. TikTok: A Potential Sea Change for § 230 Immunity
In late August the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals released a far reaching decision, holding that § 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) did not provide a safe harbor for the social media company TikTok when its algorithms recommended and promoted a video which allegedly led a minor to accidentally kill herself. Anderson v. TikTok (3rd Cir. Aug. 27, 2024). Introduction First, a brief reminder - § 230, which was enacted in 1996, has been the guardian angel of internet platform...
Copyright And The Challenge of Large Language Models
“AI models are what’s known in computer science as black boxes: You can see what goes in and what comes out; what happens in between is a mystery." Trust but Verify: Peeking Inside the “Black Box” of Machine Learning In December 2023, The New York Times filed a landmark lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging copyright infringement. This case, along with a number of similar cases filed against AI companies, brings to the forefront a fundamental challenge in applying traditional...
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