Intellectual property (IP) rights and IP-related rights, such as trade secrets and regulatory exclusivities, play a crucial role in the development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. However, possible interactions may be anticipated when comparing the legal relationships formed by these rights with those established by human rights. This study synthesises 53 laws and treaties illustrating the IP landscape for AI in health systems across Europe and examines their intersections with health-focused human rights. Our analysis reveals that a great variety of datasets, software, hardware, output, AI model architecture, data bases, and graphical user interfaces can be subject to IP protection. Although codified limitations and exceptions on IP and IP-related rights exist, interpretation of their conditions and scope permits for diverse interpretations and is left to the discretion of courts. Comparing these rights to health-focused human rights highlights tensions between promoting innovation and ensuring accessibility, quality, and equity in health systems, as well as between human rights ideals and the protection of European digital sovereignty. As these rights often pursue conflicting objectives and may involve trade-offs, future research should explore new ways to reconcile these objectives and foster solidarity in sharing the risks and benefits among stakeholders."
John Frank, Ashley Gold, Axios ; Inside Colorado's "bullish with guardrails" AI approach
"Colorado's approach to integrating artificial intelligence into government functions is "bullish with guardrails."
Why it matters: Colorado offers a model for balancing AI innovation with safety, barring the technology from "anything that looks or smells or could possibly be thought of as a consequential decision," David Edinger, the state's chief information officer, told Axios in an interview.
Driving the news: The approach is a directive from Gov. Jared Polis, a former technology entrepreneur who encouraged the state's technology office to embrace AI in government.
The state's Office of Information and Technology created a framework for AI use with the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, considering the needs of different state agencies.
KAREN WOOLSTRUM , University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Pitt School of Medicine Student Innovator is Empowering People to Take Charge of Their Healthcare
"Inspiration Strikes in the ER
While her research focuses on cystic fibrosis, Li’s entrepreneurial journey began during a rotation in the emergency room. It dawned on her that many patients in the ER could be empowered to take control of their own health monitoring and potentially avoid traumatic and costly ER visits. She quickly devised an idea for an electronic stethoscope that people can use to measure vital signs of the heart and lungs from home.
In collaboration with a friend, Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland, she founded Korion Health and entered the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation (part of the OIE).
They were awarded a modest $2,000 4th-place prize, but the value they received from the month-long competition and mentorship extended far beyond that. The experience of crafting her pitch and having her idea validated in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs gave her the confidence to continue pursuing the device’s commercial potential.
Next up was a pitch competition hosted by the Product Development Managers Association (PDMA) in which she won free first place in the graduate-student category, with the award including consulting hours from local companies such as Bally Design and Lexicon Design that she said “helped me take my half-baked idea and turn it into a prototype to show to investors.”
“This was a high yield for the effort. If it’s something they can hold in their hands it really helps communicate the value proposition,” she added.
From there, things began to snowball. On the same day that she won the UpPrize Social Innovation Competition sponsored by Bank of New York in the racial equity category ($75k), she won the first place prize from the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator ($50k). The resulting publicity attracted the attention of organizers of the Hult Prize Competition, a global student startup competition that receives thousands of applicants each year, who invited her to apply.
“I didn’t know anything about the Hult Prize competition. At first, I thought it was spam,” she admitted.
She had no illusions of advancing to the finals near London, let alone winning the top prize of $1 million: until she did."
ROSE ESFANDIARI , IP Watchdog; Professors Press SCOTUS to Affirm Copyright Protection for AI-Created Works
"On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”"
Kimmy Yam, NBC News ; MIT is first school to reject Trump administration's agenda in exchange for funding benefits
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Friday became the first school to reject an offer of federal funds in exchange for agreeing to the Trump administration's education agenda.
MIT disagreed with a number of aspects of the administration's proposal, which was sent to nine major universities last week, arguing that it would restrict the university's freedom of expression and independence, Sally Kornbluth, president of the Cambridge-based school, wrote in a letter Friday to the Department of Education.
“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences,” Kornbluth wrote. “Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”"
"Rethinking ownership
The intersection of AI, consciousness and intellectual property requires us to rethink how ownership should evolve. Keeping intellectual property strictly human-centred safeguards accountability, moral agency and the recognition of human creativity. At the same time, acknowledging AI’s expanding role in production may call for new approaches in law. These could take the form of shared ownership models, new categories of liability or entirely new rights frameworks.
For now, the legal balance remains with humans. As long as AI lacks consciousness, it cannot be considered a rights-holder under existing intellectual property theories. Nonetheless, as machine intelligence advances, society faces a pivotal choice. Do we reinforce a human-centred system to protect dignity and creativity or do we adapt the law to reflect emerging realities of collaboration between humans and machines?
This is more than a legal debate. It is a test of how much we value human creativity in an age of intelligent machines. The decisions we take today will shape the future of intellectual property and the meaning of authorship, innovation and human identity itself."
Tracey Spicer, The Guardian; Watering down Australia’s AI copyright laws would sacrifice writers’ livelihoods to ‘brogrammers’
"My latest book, which is about artificial intelligence discriminating against people from marginalised communities, was composed on an Apple Mac.
Whatever the form of recording the first rough draft of history, one thing remains the same: they are very human stories – stories that change the way we think about the world.
A society is the sum of the stories it tells. When stories, poems or books are “scraped”, what does this really mean?
The definition of scraping is to “drag or pull a hard or sharp implement across (a surface or object) so as to remove dirt or other matter”.
A long way from Brisbane or Bangladesh, in the rarefied climes of Silicon Valley, scrapers are removing our stories as if they are dirt.
These stories are fed into the machines of the great god: generative AI. But the outputs – their creations – are flatter, less human, more homogenised. ChatGPT tells tales set in metropolitan areas in the global north; of young, cishet men and people living without disability.
We lose the stories of lesser-known characters in remote parts of the world, eroding our understanding of the messy experience of being human.
Where will we find the stories of 64-year-old John from Traralgon, who died from asbestosis? Or seven-year-old Raha from Jaipur, whose future is a “choice” between marriage at the age of 12 and sexual exploitation?
OpenAI’s creations are not the “machines of loving grace” envisioned in the 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, where he dreams of a “cybernetic meadow”.
Scraping is a venal money grab by oligarchs who are – incidentally – scrambling to protect their own intellectual property during an AI arms race.
The code behind ChatGPT is protected by copyright, which is considered to be a literary work. (I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.)
Meta has already stolen the work of thousands of Australian writers.
Now, our own Productivity Commission is considering weakening our Copyright Act to include an exemption for text and data mining, which may well put us out of business.
In its response, The Australia Institute uses the analogy of a car: “Imagine grabbing the keys for a rental car and just driving around for a while without paying to hire it or filling in any paperwork. Then imagine that instead of being prosecuted for breaking the law, the government changed the law to make driving around in a rental car legal.”
It’s more like taking a piece out of someone’s soul, chucking it into a machine and making it into something entirely different. Ugly. Inhuman.
The commission’s report seems to be an absurdist text. The argument for watering down copyright is that it will lead to more innovation. But the explicit purpose of the Copyright Act is to protect innovation, in the form of creative endeavour.
Our work is being devalued, dismissed and destroyed; our livelihoods demolished.
In this age of techno-capitalism, it appears the only worthwhile innovation is being built by the “brogrammers”.
US companies are pinching Australian content, using it to train their models, then selling it back to us. It’s an extractive industry: neocolonialism, writ large."
Garrett M. Graff , The New York Times; Trump Is Squandering the Greatest Gift of the Manhattan Project
"The Manhattan Project was a towering achievement, one of the great stories of human effort and accomplishment. Yet the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling the culture of research that the Manhattan Project and World War II bequeathed us, a culture that propelled American prosperity.
At no other time in modern history has a country so thoroughly turned its back on its core national strengths. The very elements that made the Manhattan Project such a success are today under assault. With devastating cuts to science and health research, the administration is turning its back on a history of being powered and renewed by the innovation and vision of immigrants. What America may find is that we have squandered the greatest gift of the Manhattan Project — which, in the end, wasn’t the bomb but a new way of looking at how science and government can work together."
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ; Invention-Con 2025: Empowering American ingenuity and innovation
"Do you want to grow your intellectual property (IP) knowledge and gain access to IP and business experts, accomplished innovators, and inspiring entrepreneurs? Join us for the USPTO's free flagship conference for inventors, makers, and entrepreneurs. Don’t miss Invention-Con 2025, coming to you virtually September 9-10 from 1:00 – 3:30 p.m. ET daily. Tailored for the independent inventor and entrepreneur community, our marquee event brings inspiration and IP experts directly to you.
Learn from accomplished innovators, inventors, entrepreneurs, and business owners how to use IP to achieve success.
Discover resources available to assist at every stage of your journey.
Connect with IP and business experts who can help you develop a strategy for your innovation, from idea to market."
TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Two Courts Rule On Generative AI and Fair Use — One Gets It Right
"Gen-AI is spurring the kind of tech panics we’ve seen before; then, as now, thoughtful fair use opinions helped ensure that copyright law served innovation and creativity. Gen-AI does raise a host of other serious concerns about fair labor practices and misinformation, but copyright wasn’t designed to address those problems. Trying to force copyright law to play those roles only hurts important and legal uses of this technology.
In keeping with that tradition, courts deciding fair use in other AI copyright cases should look to Bartz, not Kadrey."
THINH H. NGUYEN AND DEREK E. BAMBAUER, The Hill ; The US Copyright Office is wrong about artificial intelligence
"AI is too important to allow copyright to impede its progress, especially as America seeks to maintain its global competitiveness in tech innovation."
Phil Kerpen, Daily Journal; Intellectual property is our bedrock
"Elon Musk is probably the second-most powerful man in the world these days, so when he responded to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s “delete all IP law” post with “I agree,” we need to take this radical proposal seriously.
Musk and Dorsey want their AI bots to remix all the world’s content without having to worry about who owns it, but it’s important that we slow down and start from first principles, or we risk undermining one of the foundations of our Constitution and economic system.
The moral case for IP was already powerfully articulated prior to American independence by John Locke. In his 1694 memorandum opposing the renewal of the Licensing Act, Locke wrote: “Books seem to me to be the most proper thing for a man to have a property in of any thing that is the product of his mind,” which is no doubt equally true of more modern creative works. Unlike physical property, which is a mixture of an individual’s work effort and the pre-existing natural world, creative works are the pure creation of the human mind. How could they not then properly be owned by their authors?
The Constitution cements this truth. Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” This clause isn’t incidental; it’s a deliberate choice to recognize inventors and authors properly have a property right in their creations and is the only right expressly protected in the base text of the Constitution, before the Bill of Rights was added...
Deleting all IP law is like banning free speech to stop misinformation — it might narrowly accomplish its goal, but only by destroying what we ought to be protecting."
TORI NOBLE, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); AI and Copyright: Expanding Copyright Hurts Everyone—Here’s What to Do Instead
[Kip Currier: No, not everyone. Not requiring Big Tech to figure out a way to fairly license or get permission to use the copyrighted works of creators unjustly advantages these deep pocketed corporations. It also inequitably disadvantages the economic and creative interests of the human beings who labor to create copyrightable content -- authors, songwriters, visual artists, and many others.
The tell is that many of these same Big Tech companies are only too willing to file copyright infringement lawsuits against anyone whom they allege is infringing their AI content to create competing products and services.]
[Excerpt]
"Threats to Socially Valuable Research and Innovation
Requiring researchers to license fair uses of AI training data could make socially valuable research based on machine learning (ML) and even text and data mining (TDM) prohibitively complicated and expensive, if not impossible. Researchers have relied on fair use to conduct TDM research for a decade, leading to important advancements in myriad fields. However, licensing the vast quantity of works that high-quality TDM research requires is frequently cost-prohibitive and practically infeasible.
Fair use protects ML and TDM research for good reason. Without fair use, copyright would hinder important scientific advancements that benefit all of us. Empirical studies back this up: research using TDM methodologies are more common in countries that protect TDM research from copyright control; in countries that don’t, copyright restrictions stymie beneficial research. It’s easy to see why: it would be impossible to identify and negotiate with millions of different copyright owners to analyze, say, text from the internet."
David Gewirtz, Senior Contributing Editor, ZDNet; The US Copyright Office's new ruling on AI art is here - and it could change everything
"Last week, the US Copyright Office released its detailed report and comprehensive guidelines on the issue of copyright protection and AI-generated work.
For a government legal document, it is a fascinating exploration of the intersection of artificial intelligence and the very concept of authorship and creativity. The study's authors conduct a deep dive, taking in comments from the general public and experts alike, and producing an analysis of what it means to creatively author a work.
They then explore the issue of whether an AI-generated work versus an AI-assisted work is subject to copyright protection, and what that means not only for individual authors but also for the encouragement of creativity and innovation in society as a whole.
This is the second of what will be a three-part report from the Copyright Office. Part 1, published last year, explored digital replicas, using digital technology to "realistically replicate" someone's voice or appearance.
Part 3 is expected to be released later this year. It will focus on the issues of training AIs using copyrighted works, aspects of licensing, and how liability might be allocated in cases where a spectacular AI failure can be attributed to training (which sometimes results in litigation)."
Assistant Professor of Business Law, Georgia College and State University , Newsweek; Congress Must Change Copyright Law for AI | Opinion
"Luckily, the Constitution points the way forward. In Article I, Section 8, Congress is explicitly empowered "to promote the Progress of Science" through copyright law. That is to say, the power to create copyrights isn't just about protecting content creators, it's also about advancing human knowledge and innovation.
When the Founders gave Congress this power, they couldn't have imagined artificial intelligence, but they clearly understood that intellectual property laws would need to evolve to promote scientific progress. Congress therefore not only has the authority to adapt copyright law for the AI age, it has the duty to ensure our intellectual property framework promotes rather than hinders technological progress.
Consider what's at risk with inaction...
While American companies are struggling with copyright constraints, China is racing ahead with AI development, unencumbered by such concerns. The Chinese Communist Party has made it clear that they view AI supremacy as a key strategic goal, and they're not going to let intellectual property rights stand in their way.
The choice before us is clear, we can either reform our copyright laws to enable responsible AI development at home or we can watch as the future of AI is shaped by authoritarian powers abroad. The cost of inaction isn't just measured in lost innovation or economic opportunity, it is measured in our diminishing ability to ensure AI develops in alignment with democratic values and a respect for human rights.
The ideal solution here isn't to abandon copyright protection entirely, but to craft a careful exemption for AI training. This could even include provisions for compensating content creators through a mandated licensing framework or revenue-sharing system, ensuring that AI companies can access the data they need while creators can still benefit from and be credited for their work's use in training these models.
Critics will argue that this represents a taking from creators for the benefit of tech companies, but this misses the broader picture. The benefits of AI development flow not just to tech companies but to society as a whole. We should recognize that allowing AI models to learn from human knowledge serves a crucial public good, one we're at risk of losing if Congress doesn't act."
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ; USPTO announces new Artificial Intelligence Strategy to empower responsible implementation of innovation
"AI Strategy outlines how the USPTO will address AI's impact across IP policy, agency operations, and the broader innovation ecosystem
WASHINGTON—The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy to guide the agency’s efforts toward fulfilling the potential of AI within USPTO operations and across the intellectual property (IP) ecosystem. The Strategy offers a vision for how the USPTO can foster responsible and inclusive AI innovation, harness AI to support the agency’s mission, and advance a positive future for AI to ensure that the country maintains its leadership in innovation.
“We have a responsibility to promote, empower, and protect innovation,” said Derrick Brent, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Acting Director of the USPTO. “Developing a strategy to unleash the power of AI while mitigating risks provides a framework to advance innovation and intellectual property.”
The strategy aims to achieve the USPTO’s AI vision and mission through five focus areas which include:
The USPTO and our sister agencies within the Department of Commerce, as well as the U.S. Copyright Office, are providing critical guidance and recommendations to advance AI-driven innovation and creativity. In 2022, the USPTO created the AI and Emerging Technology (ET) Partnership, which has worked closely with the AI/ET community to gather public feedback through a series of sessions on topics related to AI and innovation, biotech, and intellectual property (IP) policy. Since its 2022 launch, more than 6,000 stakeholders have engaged with us on these critical issues. In addition, the USPTO collaborates across government to advance American leadership in AI by promoting innovation and competition as set forth in the Biden-Harris Administration’s landmark October 2023 AI Executive Order.
The full text of the AI Strategy can be found on the AI Strategy webpage. Additionalinformation on AI, including USPTO guidance and more on USPTO’s AI/ET Partnership, can be found on our AI webpage. "
