Insights

Washington – August 15, 2024: The 2025 edition of The Best Lawyers in America® has recognized 42 Crowell & Moring lawyers as "Best Lawyers" and 29 lawyers as “Ones to Watch.”

Washington – June 6, 2024: Crowell & Moring earned 78 rankings for 67 lawyers, as well as 41 national and statewide practice area rankings, in the Chambers USA 2024 guide. The rankings are driven by independent interviews of clients and lawyers at peer firms.

In a unanimous opinion issued by the D.C. Circuit on March 18, 2025, the Court of Appeals affirmed denial of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s application to register a copyright protection for a work created by his generative artificial intelligence system, holding that the Copyright Act requires human authorship.

The U.S. Copyright Office has released Part 2 of its Report on the legal and policy issues related to copyright and artificial intelligence (AI). This part of the Report, issued on January 29, 2025, focuses on the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI. Overall, the Copyright Office concludes that existing law is sufficient to resolve questions of AI usage in copyrighted works, and sufficient human contributions to AI-generated outputs that would constitute authorship will be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. The Office declined to support a separate copyright registration analysis for AI works, but provided new examples of how using AI as a tool could support sufficient authorship for copyrightability.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group., represented by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), have sued online music AI generators, Suno AI (“Suno”) and Udio AI (“Udio”), for alleged copyright infringement, accusing them of replicating their artists’ music using AI technology. The Suno complaint is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the Udio complaint is filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  The lawsuits also target Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company. The RIAA is asking for damages amounting to up to $150,000 per infringing song, which could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. 

Artificial intelligence and the metaverse are two of the most rapidly evolving technologies today, testing the boundaries of intellectual property law. While the swift expansion of AI in all industry sectors can be thrilling, it also presents challenges in terms of protecting and encouraging artistic and scientific endeavors. A principal challenge for authors, creators, and corporations is how to protect creative endeavors from the threat of consumption and reproduction by AI engines, while at the same time realizing the promise of AI-conceived and -developed creative and technological advances. This fundamental IP conundrum also arises in the evolving metaverse.