Intellectual Property, Generative AI, and Access to Culture and Science

The research seminar is jointly organized by the Department of Business and Economic Law and the Innovation Law and Ethics Observatory (ILEO) as part of its Distinguished Speaker Series. 

Speakers:

• Christine Haight Farley (Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law, Washington D.C., US), “Generative AI, Trademark’s Limits, and the Aesthetic Commons”
• Margaret Chon (Professor of Law at Seattle University School of Law, Faculty Director of the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Institute), “Re-Imagining Global Intellectual Property Frameworks to Foster Access to Scientific Knowledge through GenAI Technology”

Chair & Introduction: Christophe Geiger (Professor of Law and Director of ILEO, Luiss University)

Date and Time: May 12, 2026, 2:30 PM 

Room: Classroom 15 – Via Parenzo 11, Department of Business and Economic Law, Luiss University, 00198 Rome.

You can participate online using this link.

Please confirm and register your attendance at ileo@luiss.it (mandatory for external visitors to enter Luiss premises).

Abstracts

Generative AI, Trademark Limits, and the Aesthetic Commons

Artistic style has never been anyone’s exclusive property. For centuries, artists have learned by imitating, responded to one another through homage, and built movements through shared aesthetic approaches. Generative artificial intelligence has disrupted this tradition not by changing its logic but by industrializing it, making style mimicry effortless, impersonal, and commercially scalable. Faced with AI systems that can produce images indistinguishable in style from their own work, artists are increasingly turning to trademark law for protection. Courts are beginning to consider these claims, and legal scholars have started to map out the trademark doctrines that would govern them. This article argues that trademark law is the wrong answer to a real problem, and that extending it to cover artistic style would inflict lasting damage on the creative commons that no procedural limitation could repair.

Artistic style doesn’t fit the law’s conception of what a trademark is. A trademark identifies a commercial source. Artistic style does something categorically different: it expresses, it situates a work within a creative tradition, and it invites response, imitation, and transformation. These are not incidental features of style but its defining functions, and they are incompatible with the core logic of the trademark. Copyright law, the regime most naturally suited to protecting creative expression, withholds protection from style as such through its idea/expression distinction, reflecting a considered judgment that aesthetic approaches must remain available to all. A style mark would grant something that even copyright does not: control over an open-ended set of aesthetic features wherever they appear, in any work, by any hand, for as long as the mark remains in use. The scope of that right would be not only broader than anything copyright permits, but broader than anything the law has ever recognized in a creative work. 

This categorical mismatch has doctrinal consequences across trademark law. Distinctiveness, use as a mark, and aesthetic functionality each serve as partial expressions of the same underlying problem: style resists the source-identifying function that trademark protection presupposes. Courts that have addressed style mark claims have consistently recognized this mismatch without fully articulating it, instead opting for the most readily available doctrine rather than acknowledging the fundamental incompatibility. The result is a body of case law that is technically correct in its outcomes but doctrinally unstable, and therefore vulnerable to erosion as judicial sympathy for artists facing generative AI grows.

The generative AI moment does not create a new case for style mark protection; it exposes why such protection was always untenable. When style mimicry was a human practice, its costs were limited by the effort, skill, and time required to convincingly imitate another artist. Generative AI removes those constraints entirely. In that environment, style mark recognition would not protect a narrow set of distinctive artistic identities. Instead, it would create rights with a genuinely unknowable scope, because artistic style is inherently porous: it bleeds across artists, periods, and traditions in ways that resist clear delineation. Every artist working within a recognizable aesthetic tradition would face potential liability, the boundaries of which no court could reliably determine in advance. The doctrine would not function as a targeted remedy for consumer confusion but as a structural tax on artistic influence itself.

Style is part of the creative commons. Trademark law should not become the permanent refuge for claims that no other body of law was designed to vindicate, and for good reason.

Reimagining Global Intellectual Property Frameworks to Foster Access to Scientific Knowledge through GenAI Technology

This project reimagines global intellectual property (IP) frameworks to make cutting-edge scientific knowledge available and barrier-free for the first time to a majority of the world’s population. It addresses how generative artificial intelligence (genAI) for human language translation can solve the vast disparity in access to scientific literature. While scientific talent and knowledge are distributed throughout humankind and all countries would benefit from multi-directional access to knowledge, language differences unnecessarily impede the flow of scientific exchange. For example, over 90 percent of current scientific publications are in English, but less than 25 percent of the world's population is proficient in English. In addition to language barriers, legal barriers to the exchange of scientific knowledge unnecessarily perpetuate ongoing inequities in the distribution of global research and development capacity, as translation rights are frequently assigned to scientific publishers through copyright laws. Solutions to these language-based and legal barriers require changes to global legal frameworks to incorporate genAI's demonstrated capabilities for rapid and relatively accurate language translation. United Nations (U.N.) organizations can and should address this knowledge disparity multilaterally, similar to how the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Marrakesh Treaty eventually mandated access to works for print-disabled individuals through copyright exceptions. By advocating for the creation of high-quality repositories of scientific abstracts and the exemption of genAI translations of these abstracts (and even articles) from copyright liability, my project will establish the intellectual framework to enhance and implement UN Sustainable Development Goals 9 (“Industry, innovation, and infrastructure”) and 17 (“Partnership for the goals”), both of which concern technology.

About the Speakers

Christine Haight Farley is a Professor of Law at American University's Washington College of Law, where she teaches Intellectual Property, Trademark Law, Contracts, Art Law, and Advertising Law. Professor Farley’s scholarship has focused on the international aspects of intellectual property law, conflicts between intellectual property rights and freedom of expression, intellectual property law’s treatment of art, and the expansion of intellectual property rights. She serves as Co-Faculty Director of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and previously served as Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs. At American, Professor Farley has received the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Edwin A. Mooers Scholarship Award. She has been a visiting professor at Boston University, the University of Paris West, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Havana, Monash University (Australia), and the National Law University in Lucknow, India, and has given lectures on intellectual property in more than twenty-five countries. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Center for Inter-American Legal Education and the Advisory Board at the Saudi Authority of Intellectual Property (SAIP). She has also served on the Executive Committees of the Intellectual Property and Art Law Sections of the American Association of Law Schools, and as a member of a presidential task force of the International Trademark Association. She has received a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to teach U.S. intellectual property law to foreign law students. Before starting her academic career, Farley practiced at the New York law firm Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky & Lieberman, P.C., focusing on intellectual property litigation. She holds a B.A. (Binghamton), J.D. (Buffalo), LL.M. (Columbia), and a J.S.D. (Columbia).

<p > Margaret Chon is the faculty director of the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Institute and holds the Donald & Lynda Horowitz Endowed Chair for the Pursuit of Justice at Seattle University School of Law. She has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and review essays on knowledge governance through intellectual property, focusing primarily on the role of global intellectual property systems in promoting human flourishing and sustainable development. Her co-edited books include IMPROVING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: A GLOBAL PROJECT (with Susy Frankel, Graeme Dinwoodie, Barbara Lauriat, and Jens Schovsbo, 2023) and the CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY, AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (with Pedro Roffe and Ahmed Abdel-Latif, 2018). At Seattle University, she currently teaches intellectual property. She has also taught as a tenured professor at Syracuse University College of Law and as a visiting law professor at George Washington University (in conjunction with the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center), Jilin University, KU Leuven, Michigan State University (in conjunction with the University of Rijeka), the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pittsburgh (in conjunction with Semester at Sea), Suffolk University (in conjunction with Lund University), Tel Aviv University, the University of Hawai'i, the University of Michigan, and the University of Washington (Seattle). A proud alumna of the University of Michigan (M.H.S.A. and J.D.) and Cornell University (A.B.), she is an elected member of the American Law Institute and the American Bar Foundation. She was awarded a 2026 Bellagio Center Residency by the Rockefeller Foundation and a Jean Monnet Fellowship by the Center for International Economic Law and Justice at New York University School of Law for her research on intellectual property. She has also received grants, taught, and published on topics related to race and law, including a co-authored book on the incarceration of Japanese Americans, legal reparations, and national security.