Dawn of AI, dusk of WTO – now and next challenges for intellectual property
19 September 2025
Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University
Courtroom of the 90s/Advocacy Center 202
Alumni would wish to attend all or any part of the symposium, please email Sarah Tarus at ipprogram@lls.edu or Professor Justin Hughes at justin.hughes@lls.edu.
Program
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10:00am
Welcome
10:10am
Robert Brauneis
George Washington University Law School
Copyright and Generative AI Training: the June 2025 District Court Decisions and Beyond
Copyright owners have filed over 40 lawsuits claiming that generative AI developers' unauthorized use of their works is infringing. In late June, two federal courts in the Northern District of California held for the developers on their fair use defense, but with different analyses. This presentation will consider whether one of those analyses should prevail, or whether other courts should and will weigh in with different analyses and results.
10:45am
J. Janewa Osei-Tutu
University of Miami Law School
Mapping Publicity onto Collective Identity
Collective cultural identities are often used for marketing and selling products. Despite objections from the affected communities, it is difficult to prevent these uses. Yet in the United States right of publicity laws protect individual identities from commercial misappropriation. This project analogizes the indicia of individual identity that are protected through publicity rights to the indicia of collective cultural identities and contemplates the legal options for protecting a collective cultural identity right.
11:20am
Shani Shisha
Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law
Copyright as Intuition
Far from relying on hard-edged doctrines alone, courts increasingly appeal to intuition — driven by what moral philosophers describe as “intuitionist” sensibilities — to settle core copyright issues. Bringing together an array of sources—psychology, cognitive science, legal history, and current doctrine— this project analyzes intuition’s prevalence within the copyright system and chart a path toward doctrinal reconstruction.
11:55am
Break
Lunch talk
Robert Burrell
Oxford University Faculty of Law
Can things actually get better? Escaping IP’s Groundhog Day
Intellectual property, as a field of academic study, came to maturity in the 1990s. Like many things of this vintage, it is no longer in quite the health it once was. When the Head of the UKIPO is speculating publicly that the time to write IP’s obituary may now be foreseeable, even if it has not yet arrived, it may be worth reflecting on whether our discipline needs to be refocused to ensure its continued relevance to policymakers and students alike.
12:45-1:30pm
Panel discussion on the future of IP in post-TRIPS, AI-filled world
- Professor Jonathan Barnett, University of Southern California School of Law
- Professor Nari Lee, Hanken School of Economics
- Professor J. Janewa Osei-Tutu, University of Miami Law School
- Professor Ryan Whalen, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
Moderated by Professor Jeff Atik, Loyola Law School
1:35pm
Trevor Reed
UC Irvine Law School
The Intangible NAGPRA
The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) recognizes Tribal Nations’ ownership interests in their ancestors and artifacts; a recent regulatory update expressly includes a controversial public display right that has shuttered museum displays across the country. Though similar to widely criticized provisions of Italian cultural heritage law, this project explores how the new regulations are both justifiable given the unique status of Tribal Nations and appropriate to address long-standing human rights abuses.
2:10pm
Nari Lee
Hanken School of Economics
Borderline Relevance: Rethinking IP in the Era of EU Digital Regulation
This project looks at the concept of the data marketplace at the borderline of IP and EU digital regulation. Exploring how common EU data spaces are implemented through selected EU digital regulations (i.e., the Data Governance Act, the Data Act, and the Digital Markets Act), the project examines the extent to which IP is relevant in both this policy space and cross-border trade in data.
2:45pm
Xiyin Tang
UCLA Law School
Creativity as Data and the Copyright-Privacy Interface
By plumbing copyrighted works not for their expressive value but for their data value, LLM training makes more salient, and more pervasive, a new phenomenon I refer to as the datafication of creative works. This project argues that copyright can learn from ongoing debates in privacy law, and design a system of ex ante governance for the new world of mass, aggregated infringement, rather than debating the "correct" outcome in ex post, individualized litigation.
3:20pm
Michael Goodyear
New York Law School
Artificial Infringement
Exploring the historical evolution of copyright liability standards in response to complex machines, this project proposes causation as a guiding consideration for determining who should be liable for copyright-infringing AI-generated outputs. A causation-focused analysis suggests that the AI system itself should be directly liable, leading to a more intent-focused secondary liability analysis.
3:50pm
Wrap-up
Presenter and Participant Biographical Notes
Robert Burrell
Robert Burrell holds the Professorship of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law at Oxford, where he teaches and researches across all areas of intellectual property law. He is also a visiting professor at Melbourne Law School. Professor Burrell is the author, with Allison Coleman, of Copyright Exceptions: The Digital Impact (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and, with Michael Handler, of Australian Trade Mark Law (Oxford University Press, 2010; 2nd ed. 2016). His current research includes an interdisciplinary project with a team of psychologists to test trademark law’s assumptions about consumers.
Jonathan Barnett
Jonathan Barnett is the Torrey H. Webb Professor of Law at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law where he is also director of the law school’s Media, Entertainment and Technology Law Program. Professor Barnett is the author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2024) and Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property (Oxford University Press 2021). A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Barnett received a MPhil from Cambridge University and a JD from Yale Law School.
Robert Brauneis
Robert Brauneis is the Michael J. McKeon Professor of Intellectual Property Law at George Washington University Law School, where he is co-director of the GW Center for Law and Technology. After earning his JD from Harvard Law School, Professor Brauneis served as a law clerk to Judge Stephen G. Breyer on the First Circuit and to Justice David H. Souter. His writings have included empirical work on copyright registrations, exploration of copyright in musical works, and the arguments surrounding AI training on copyrighted materials.
Michael Goodyear
Michael Goodyear is an Associate Professor at New York Law School where his research explores how intellectual property rights and liabilities evolve in response to technological and cultural change . He also studies how IP law can empower historically underrepresented populations, especially LGBTQ+ and Indigenous communities. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and his JD from the University of Michigan. Before joining New York Law School, Goodyear was an Acting Assistant Professor of Lawyering at NYU and had worked as an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.
Nari Lee
Nari Lee is the intellectual property law professor at Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, Finland. Prior to joining the Hanken faculty in 2012, she was program director at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property in Munich. With co-authors Annette Kur and Anna Tischner, Professor Lee’s most recent book is Fairness In Intellectual Property Law: Searching for a Uniform Concept (2024). She holds a doctor of laws from Kyushu University in Japan and a PhD from the University of Eastern Finland.
J. Janewa Osei-Tutu
Janewa Osei-Tutu is a professor at University of Miami School of Law where she teaches Trademark Law, Fashion & Cultural Heritage, as well as other courses. Much of her research focuses on the relationship between human rights law and intellectual property with her recent publications exploring how female entrepreneurs can be empowered through trademark law, IP’s role in addressing poverty, and cultural identity in fashion. Professor Osei-Tutu earned her JD from Queen’s University in Ontario and her LLM from McGill.
Trevor G. Reed
Trevor Reed is a Professor of Law at the University of California at Irvine. Professor Reed’s current research looks at how illicit appropriations of Indigenous peoples’ creativity and cultural data impacts their sovereignty today as well as what opportunities currently exist to address these impacts. Prior to joining the Irvine faculty, Professor Reed taught law at Arizona State University, where he led the university’s Indigenous Innovation Initiative. He earned both his JD and PhD from Columbia University, the latter in Ethnomusicology.
Shani Shisha
Shani Shisha is an Assistant Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law, where he teaches Copyright Law, Contracts, and the IP Survey course. Professor Shisha’s recent articles have appeared in NYU Law Review, Boston College Law Review, and Southern California Law Review. He earned his LLB from Tel-Aviv University and his LLM and SJD from Harvard Law School.
Xiyin Tang
Xiyin Tang is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She has previously served as a lead counsel for Facebook and an associate at Mayer Brown LLP and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, where she worked on a variety of transactional and litigation matters in the technology, media, and entertainment sectors. Tang received her BA from Columbia University and her JD from Yale Law School. In addition to law review publications, Professor Tang is a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright.
Ryan Whalen
Ryan Whalen is an Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies (CILS). His research takes a data-driven approach to understanding the law and legal systems, with a particular focus on intellectual property law and innovation policy. His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals including the University of Chicago Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Journal of the Patent and Trademark Office Society, and the New England Journal of Medicine.