AI Archives - Barry Sookman

Copyright Infringement and AI: Insights from Getty v Stability AI

Getty v Stability AI

In a landmark decision released yesterday in Getty Images (US) Inc v Stability AI Limited [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch), a United Kingdom court ruled that Stability AI was not liable for secondary copyright infringement by importing or distributing models that were partly trained using images allegedly owned or exclusively licensed by Getty. Central to the decision was the finding of Justice Joanna Smith that Stability AI’s trained models did not store copies of Getty images as required by the U.K. Copyright, Designs, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (the “CDPA”), and hence were not infringing copies, even though they may have been trained without copyright holder authorization.…

Thaler c PAB

AI Inventors? Thaler Commissioner Decision

There is an aphorism, ““If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” But, according to another aphorism ““Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Well, when it comes to Stephen Thaler, the latter aphorism appears apt. Try as he might, he has consistently lost court cases around the world which rejected his contention that content generated entirely by an artificial intelligence system can be protected either by copyrights or patents. This includes losses before the U.S.…

Bartz v Anthropic

Uncategorized

Anthropic AI Decision on Copyright Fair Use

United States District Court judge William Alsup just released an important decision in the AI copyright litigation in Bartz v Anthropic PBC. He summarized his ruling as follows:

The use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
The digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use …because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.

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Sookman it year in review talk presentation

Technology Law: A Comprehensive Annual Review 2024-2025

Computer and IT Law: The Year in Review 2024–2025 – Toronto Computer Lawyers Group Presentation

On June 19, 2025, I had the pleasure of presenting my annual “Computer and IT Law: The Year in Review” to the Toronto Computer Lawyers Group. This year’s talk covered legal developments across a wide range of topics including artificial intelligence, copyright, social media, privacy, cybersecurity, blockchain, online contracting and eCommerce.

As in past years, I prepared a comprehensive written paper to accompany the presentation.…

Thaler and AI copyright

AI
Copyright

AI copyright and human authorship: Thaler v Perlmutter

Content generated entirely using artificial intelligence and with no human control over the expression generated cannot be protected by copyright. In short, an author must be a human being. This unsurprising conclusion was confirmed again by a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Thaler v Permultter No. 23-5233 (D.C. Cir. March 18, 2025). In reaching its conclusion, the court acknowledged that content created using AI systems may be protected by copyright, but did not address where the line should be drawn as to what level of human authorship must exist for a work to be protected or the scope of protection to be given to a work created with the aid of an AI system.…

Negligent chatbot

artificial inteliigence

Moffatt v. Air Canada: A Misrepresentation by an AI Chatbot

The recent decision in Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, represents a milestone in the expanding field of digital interactions and accountability. The case grapples with whether a company can be held liable for misleading information provided by an automated chatbot on its website. The decision held that a company can be liable for negligent misrepresentations made by a chatbot on a publicly available commercial website. The decision represents an incremental development of the law which previously has focused on the liability of persons for their pre-programmed automated tools.…

Generative AI in federal Court

AI
AI Ethics

Federal Court issues notice requiring disclosure of use of generative AI in court documents

The federal Court just released a notice to the parties and the profession regarding “The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Court Proceedings“. It will require all parties, lawyers and interveners to include a Declaration in all documents prepared for the purpose of litigation that are submitted to the Court that contains content created or generated by AI. The Declaration must state “Artificial intelligence (AI) was used to generate content in this document”. While there are good reasons for courts to be concerned about “hallucinations” in court documents, there does not seem to be cogent reasons for a declaration where there has been a human properly in the loop to verify the content generated.…

Copyright and IOT and AI

Copyright, AI and IOT: my submission to the consultation

Here is a copy of my submission to the copyright consultation on the implications of AI and IOT on copyright.

Thank you for providing an opportunity to provide input into the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IOT) copyright consultation.

The copyright consultation raises important issues. The government should be cautious before making any amendments to the Copyright Act given the complexity of the issues and the difficulty in assessing how the changes would work in practice.

Background

I am Senior counsel in the Technology Law Group of McCarthy Tetrault LLP.…

2020 Holiday reading: Blockchain, AI and the Four Digital Titans

Happy new year everyone. I hope you all had a good vacation with some spare reading time. Over the holidays, I had the pleasure to listen to four audiobooks. It is pretty clear that the next decade is going to be another exciting ride for us tech and IP lawyers.

The first audiobook was Blockchain and the Law: The Rule of Code, written by Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright. A lot has been written about blockchain. In this book, the authors not only look at developments, past, present and future, but also provide an ambitious, scholarly, and fact rich analysis of the legal challenges associated with blockchain.…

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