Legal Experts Highlight Key IP Trends To Watch
April 20, 2025 – Media MentionLitigation Partner Steven Stein shared his insights with Daily Journal and LA Times Studios regarding litigation and potential new laws that could shape the future of intellectual property.
Excerpts:
Stein thinks the New York Times et al. v. OpenAI case, ongoing in the Southern District of New York, will be a far more significant test of whether fair use is an adequate defense against allegations AI companies improperly scrape data. The newspaper and other media organizations accuse OpenAI of improperly accessing their data to train its AI models.
Outside of AI, Stein said that a potential broadening of copyright terminations to overseas jurisdictions was an issue firmly on his radar for the year ahead.
Copyright infringement as it pertains to the use of embedded videos on websites, and the potential for the issue to land before the U.S. Supreme Court, is another development catching Stein’s attention.
Stein said that music publishing companies are increasingly pursuing copyright infringement claims against organizations that use unlicensed music in social media content, with Sony recently filing a lawsuit against USC for music used in university-related social media posts. “Out of all these music infringement cases that have been filed, there haven’t really been rulings in them that address or speak to the issues implicated by these claims. Most of these cases are settled. So, if any of these cases are ever litigated, and there are many pending, including the one that was filed last week , it’d be very interesting to see what the judges do with them.”
