Author Archives: John DiGiacomo

The holders of copyrights for newspapers, magazines, books, and other publications are involved in numerous legal battles with owners of AI modules over alleged copyright infringement. The plaintiff copyright owners claim that the AI large language modules have been trained on huge quantities of copyrighted materials without permission and — most importantly — without payment. […]

The owners of most small, closely-held businesses negotiate and sign some form of an “Owner’s Agreement.” An important part of such Agreements is the “Buy-Sell” provisions. These are often some of the most difficult to negotiate. The gist of the buy-sell part of the Owners’ Agreement is to establish the rules for what happens if […]

Social media content moderation by technology platforms was one of the “hot” legal topics in 2023-2024. Three States — California, Texas, and Florida — passed different statutes to either require more content moderation (California) or to limit such moderation (Texas and Florida). All the statutes, in one way or another, demanded more transparency and information […]

YouTubers know they have to comply with all the various YouTube rules and regulations. These include Youtube rules related to endorsements of products and sponsored content. However, YouTubers also have to comply with statutes and government regulations, which are often more strict than their YouTube counterparts. The most important set of rules has been issued […]

For many direct-to-consumer (“D2C”) e-commerce businesses, China is the source of the products that are delivered to consumers directly from the manufacturing or processing centers. The business model works economically for many reasons, including what is generally called the de minimis customs and postal rule. This rule allows packages with values less than $800 to […]

In every name, image, and likeness (“NIL”) endorsement agreement, there are provisions that prohibit the use of team logos and designs and that ban the athlete from appearing in his or her team’s jersey or other identifying clothes. This may seem puzzling since the reason the athlete is being sought out for NIL endorsements is […]

One of the many ongoing cases involving copyright laws and AI generative modules and programs involves plaintiffs, Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre, GMBH, and West Publishing Corp., against a now-defunct business — Ross Intelligence, Inc. Ross Intelligence is accused of copyright infringement when it attempted to create an AI-driven alternative to one of Reuters’ online products, […]

Under U.S. Trademark law, there is no legal limit to the number of words or characters that can be considered a “phrase” for trademark purposes. So, in theory, you could try to register a trademark for a 100-character phrase. And, occasionally, over the years, applicants have tried to register trademarks with very long phrases. In […]

Practically speaking, the answer is “no.” As many know, Amazon’s Terms of Service and other agreements require that any disputes be submitted to binding private arbitration (as opposed to resolution through the process of a public court proceeding). Through movies, television, and literary depictions and descriptions, many people have some sense of how court proceedings […]

As we have written here on this blog, artificial intelligence (“AI”) programs and modules are causing turmoil in the area of copyright law. In general, three areas are concerning to copyright holders: The vast amount of pending AI/copyright litigation is focusing on the first two questions and the litigation is now going global. For example, […]