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) in 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 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: 12 May 2026, h. 14.30 

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

Online participation is possible, using this link.

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

Abstracts

Generative AI, Trademark’s 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. Confronted 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 entertain these claims, and legal scholars have begun to map 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 can repair.

Artistic style does not fit the law’s conception of what a trademark is. A trademark identifies 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 trademark’s core logic. 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 just broader than anything copyright permits but broader than anything the law has ever recognized in a creative work. 

This categorical mismatch has doctrinal consequences throughout trademark law. Distinctiveness, use as a mark, and aesthetic functionality each operate as partial expressions of the same underlying problem: that style resists the source-identifying function that trademark protection presupposes. Courts that have confronted style mark claims have consistently sensed this mismatch without fully articulating it, reaching for whichever doctrine was nearest to hand rather than naming the foundational 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 bounded by the effort, skill, and time required to imitate another artist convincingly. Generative AI eliminates those constraints entirely. In that environment, style mark recognition would not protect a narrow set of distinctive artistic identities. It would instead produce rights of genuinely unknowable scope, because artistic style is inherently porous: it bleeds across artists, periods, and traditions in ways that resist clean delineation. Every artist working in a recognizable aesthetic tradition would face potential liability whose boundaries no court could reliably fix in advance. The doctrine would not function as a targeted remedy for consumer confusion but as a structural tax on artistic influence itself.

Style belongs to 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.

Re-Imagining Global Intellectual Property Frameworks to Foster Access to Scientific Knowledge through GenAI Technology

This project re-imagines 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 huge disparity in access to scientific literature. While scientific talent and knowledge is 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 the current scientific publications are in English but less than 25 percent of the world's population is proficient in English. Besides language barriers, legal barriers to scientific knowledge exchange unnecessarily perpetuate on-going inequities in the distribution of global research and development capacity because translation rights are frequently assigned to scientific publishers through copyright laws. Solutions to these language-based and legal blockages require changes in 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, similarly 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 formation of high-quality repositories of scientific abstracts and 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”), which both concern technology.

About the Speakers

Christine Haight Farley is a Professor of Law at American University, 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 Advisory Board at the Saudi Authority of Intellectual Property (SAIP) and has served on the Executive Committees of the Intellectual Property and the 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 is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Specialist grant to teach U.S. intellectual property law to foreign law students. Before beginning her academic career, Farley practiced with the New York law firm of 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).

Margaret Chon is faculty director of the Technology, Innovation Law, and Ethics (TILE) Institute and the Donald & Lynda Horowitz Endowed Chair for the Pursuit of Justice at Seattle University School of Law. Author of numerous articles, book chapters and review essays on knowledge governance through intellectual property, she focuses mainly 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 and has also taught as a tenured professor at Syracuse University College of Law as well 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), University of Notre Dame, University of Pittsburgh (in conjunction with Semester at Sea), Suffolk University (in conjunction with Lund University), Tel Aviv University, University of Hawai'i, 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. The recipient of a 2026 Bellagio Center Residency from the Rockefeller Foundation and a Jean Monnet Fellowship from the Center for International Economic Law and Justice at New York University School of Law for her intellectual property research, she has also received grants, taught, and published on topics in race and law, including a co-authored book on the Japanese American incarceration, legal reparations, and national security.