Michael McLaughlin , Bloomberg Law; Copyright Law Set to Govern AI Under Trump’s Executive Order
[Kip Currier: I posted this Bloomberg Law article excerpt to the Canvas site for the graduate students in my Intellectual Property and Open Movements course this term, along with the following note:
Copyright law is the potential giant-slayer vis-a-vis AI tech companies that have used copyrighted works as AI training data, without permission or compensation.
Information professionals who have IP acumen (e.g. copyright law and fair use familiarity) will have vital advantages on the job market and in their organizations.]
[Excerpt]
"The legal landscape for artificial intelligence is entering a period of rapid consolidation. With President Donald Trump’s executive order in December 2025 establishing a national AI framework, the era of conflicting state-level rules may be drawing to a close.
But this doesn’t signal a reduction in AI-related legal risk. It marks the beginning of a different kind of scrutiny—one centered not on regulatory innovation but on the most powerful legal instrument already available to federal courts: copyright law.
The lesson emerging from recent AI litigation, most prominently Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, is that the greatest potential liability to AI developers doesn’t come from what their models generate. It comes from how those models were trained, and from the provenance of the content used in that training.
As the federal government asserts primacy over AI governance, the decisive question will be whether developers can demonstrate that their training corpora were acquired lawfully, licensed appropriately (unless in the public domain), and documented thoroughly."
