AI Tools Speed up IP Enforcement, but Major Litigation Spike Unlikely

However, in a recent interview with The American Lawyer, Intellectual Property partner Ed Cavazos said he does not expect the rise of AI to trigger a surge in new litigation or generate a significant revenue increase for defense firms. He noted that creators and rights holders of content like images and music already rely on sophisticated tools to detect online infringements, describing it as a “constant arms race” to locate and pursue violators across the internet.

“The extent that AI could do that smarter and better and faster, then, that doesn’t surprise me at all that IP owners have asked their lawyers to use whatever tools they can to go out and find infringing works out there,” Cavazos said. “I don’t expect that to slow down. I think the more advanced technologies that come out will just make that even more prevalent.”

He added that “there will almost certainly be more ‘cease and desist’ letters sent as they find more of these things.”

“Occasionally, there will be people who receive those letters who want to dispute it [but] I think in the vast majority of these situations, people just take the material down,” he said. “If it’s a significant infringement by a business, that’s a bigger deal.”

He also noted that many enforcement campaigns have already been ongoing. “A lot of them are not done by outside counsel—they’re done by either third-party firms that conduct searches for infringements and in-house teams that monitor online activity,” he said.

Cavazos said content owners are enforcing “not necessarily because they believe each and every other violation is going to hit them financially.”

“For some types of IP like trademarks, if you don’t enforce with some regularity and don’t make a good effort to enforce, you could lose your trademark,” he said. “There could come a time when if you are not using some of these technologies, for what we call ‘policing’ for trademark infringement, then someone might argue you’re not doing a diligent job of making sure people aren’t out there infringing.”

Noting that many alleged infringers, such as small businesses, don’t realize they need licenses to use the IP, Cavazos added: “I don’t think they’re all actively hiding their material, though, obviously, there are exceptions who don’t care about the rules and blatantly infringe.”

“It’s just impossible for a company that owns IP to monitor that manually,” he said. “Using tools to do that makes total sense. As there are more obscure uses, like on a discussion board where people are constantly using images or posting music or something, it makes finding infringements that much more difficult. AI is going to help that tremendously for the content owners.”

He also mentioned that IP law might need to be updated to expand and reinforce the legal doctrine of online fair use, as the law still contemplates a time when print, film and television were the dominant forms of entertainment and communication.

“Previously, because infringers had to put a lot of money and effort to get the infringing work out into the world and they were more likely to be bad actors,” he said. “On the internet, where it doesn’t cost anything and it’s easy to do, they may not be necessarily bad actors, they may just not understand the rules.”

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