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
Kadrey v. Meta: Will Market Dilution Reshape AI Copyright Law?
The recent blockbuster decisions in Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta have raised a number of important and controversial issues. On the facts, both cases held that using copyright-protected works to train large language models was fair use. Still, AI industry executives shouldn’t be too quick to celebrate. Bartz held that Anthropic is liable for creating a library of millions of works downloaded illegally from "shadow libraries," and it could be facing hundreds of millions of dollars in...
Reddit v. Anthropic: Contract Law as the New Frontier in AI Data Governance
At the heart of large language model (LLM) technology lies a deceptively simple triad: compute, algorithms, and data. Compute powers training - vast arrays of graphics processing units crunching numbers at a scale measured in billions of parameters and trillions of tokens. Algorithms shape the intelligence - breakthroughs like the Transformer architecture enable models to understand, predict, and generate human-like text. Data is the raw material, the fuel that teaches the models everything...
Did a Landmark AI-Copyright Report Trigger a Political Purge?
On May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released what should have been the most significant copyright policy document of the year: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – Part 3: Generative AI Training. This exhaustively researched report, the culmination of an August 2023 notice of inquiry that drew over 10,000 public comments, represents the Office’s most comprehensive analysis of how large-scale AI model training intersects with copyright law. Crucially, the report takes a skeptical view...
Copyright Office Issues Long-Awaited Report on Generative AI Training – Register of Copyrights Is Fired Next Day
The Copyright Office has been engaged in a multi-year study of how copyright law intersects with artificial intelligence. That process culminated in a series of three separate reports: Part 1 - Unauthorized Digital Replicas, Part 2 - Copyrightability, and now, the much-anticipated Part 3—Generative AI Training. Many in the copyright community anticipated that the arrival of Part 3 would be the most important and controversial. It addresses a central legal question in the flood of recent...
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