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James Gatto

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Jim Gatto is a partner in the Intellectual Property Practice Group in the firm’s Washington, D.C. office. He is Co-Leader of the Artificial Intelligence Team, the Blockchain & Fintech Team, and Leader of the Open Source Team.

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The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has issued a Request for Comments (RFC) on Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system accountability measures and policies to advance its efforts to ensure AI systems work as claimed and without causing harm. The RFC is targeting self-regulatory, regulatory, and other measures and policies to provide reliable evidence that AI systems are legal, effective, ethical, safe, and otherwise trustworthy. It is also seeking policies that can support the development of AI audits, assessments, certifications and other mechanisms to create earned trust in AI systems that they work as claimed (similar to how financial audits create trust in financial statements).…

Continue Reading Another Federal Agency Issues Request for Comments on AI

The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affirmed a district court ruling that the asserted nonliteral elements of a software program were not copyright protectable, in part, because allegedly copied materials contained unprotectable open-source elements, factual and data elements and other known elements that were not original.…

Continue Reading Divided Federal Circuit Makes Controversial Ruling That Nonliteral Elements of “Cloned” Software Are Not Protectable Because It Was Based on Open Source and Other Known Material

On March 16, 2023, the U. S. Copyright Office (USCO) launched a new AI Initiative to examine the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI), including the scope of copyright in works generated using AI tools and using copyrighted materials in AI training. According to the USCO: “This initiative is in direct response to the recent striking advances in generative AI technologies and their rapidly growing use by individuals and businesses.” It is also a response to requests from Congress and the public.…

Continue Reading Copyright Office Artificial Intelligence Initiative and Resource Guide

Roblox recently announced that it is working on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that will help developers who build experiences on Roblox, to more easily create games and assets. The first two test tools create generative AI content from a text prompt and enable generative AI to complete computer code. This is just the tip of the iceberg on how generative AI will be used in games and a variety of other creative industries. Music, film, art, comic books, and literary works are some other uses. AI tools are powerful and their use will no doubt be far reaching. In the near term, so too will the associated legal issues. Some of the legal issues include:…

Continue Reading How Generative AI Generates Legal Issues in the Games Industry

We have previously posted about the SEC lawsuit against LBRY. In that post, we noted that while the crypto community is rightfully focused on the Ripple case to see how the SEC will fare in court on enforcements alleging cryptocurrency offerings are a security, a lesser-known case may provide clarity first. And today that came to be. The federal district court in the LBRY case granted summary judgment in favor of the SEC. In so ruling, the Court found no reasonable trier of fact could reject the SEC’s contention that LBRY offered LBC as a security, and LBRY does not have a triable defense that it lacked fair notice.
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Continue Reading Federal Court Rules LBRY Offered Security and Rejects Arguments SEC Did Not Provide Fair Notice

We previously blogged about the NFT insider trading case against Nathaniel Chastain. He was charged with wire fraud and money laundering in connection with a scheme to commit “insider trading” in Non-Fungible Tokens (“NFTs”) by using confidential information about what NFTs were going to be featured on a marketplace homepage for his personal financial gain. Despite referring to this case as insider trading, there was no allegation that the NFTs at issue were securities. This caused many in the NFT community to question whether this activity could be illegal if the NFTs were not securities. In fact, there was a fair amount of misinformation circulated about this issue. To clarify the legal issues, we explained in a second blog about this case that there is Supreme Court precedent (Carpenter v. US) that found that mail and wire fraud charges need not be predicated on the underlying subject matter constituting a security. Nevertheless, Chastain moved to dismiss the indictment based on this and two other arguments. The Court refused to dismiss the indictment. The Court found that the Carpenter case “actually dooms Chastain’s argument.”
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Continue Reading NFT Insider Trading Charge Doesn’t Require the NFT To Be a Security