Morgan Lewis’s technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions team often advises on transactions where there is some form of intellectual property being transferred from one party to another party. This may be due to a corporate transaction, a cooperation or joint venture arrangement, or some other form of commercial agreement.

As part of our Spotlight series, we invited litigation partners Dana E. Becker (Philadelphia), Shon Lo (Chicago), and Krista Vink Venegas, Ph.D. (Chicago), to talk about recent trends and issues in IP-related and other commercial litigation that would be of particular interest to our readers. Dana, Shon, and Krista are deeply knowledgeable practitioners in the IP and commercial contracts space who handle a broad spectrum of leading-edge and high-profile litigation for our clients.

Despite global shocks and forecasts of a global recession, economies in the Middle East showed "extraordinarily fast" growth in 2022, according to the World Bank. The countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain—all show commitment to further growth and place great value on diversification of their historically oil and gas dominated economies, with digital transformation, artificial intelligence, robotics, cloud-first, and emerging technologies at the core of their strategic development.

As noted in our recent blog posts, The Rise of Next-Gen Business Process Outsourcing and Key Contracting Issues to Consider, the core premise of next-gen business process outsourcing (BPO) includes (1) the leveraging of automation, bots, performance tools, and other technology to transform and optimize workflows and business processes and (2) the implementation of solutions to collect and analyze data to improve user experiences and business outcomes. Next-gen BPO drives the development and implementation of transformative technology and the generation of critical business data. As such, the identification of key intellectual property (IP) and the allocation of IP use and ownership rights invariably becomes a gating issue in contract structuring and negotiations.

The recent rise in popularity of generative AI–powered applications such as ChatGPT poses important copyright issues for individuals and businesses with respect to content creation, including the scope of rights with respect to commercial use, content publication, potential liability for infringement, and content enforcement.

The UK government published a white paper on March 29 setting out a “pro-innovation” UK regulatory framework for artificial intelligence (AI). The framework centers upon five cross-sectoral principles, of which implementation will be context-specific to the use of AI, rather than the technology itself. The government does not propose introducing a new regulator or any new legal requirements on businesses, instead leveraging existing powers of UK regulators and their domain-specific expertise.

Until early 2023, a public disagreement regarding open intellectual property licenses was ongoing between the owner of a significant piece of popular content—the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)—and the individuals and corporates that engage with it for free.

New York recently passed a law that, effective immediately, allows student athletes at colleges within the state to receive compensation for their name, image, and likeness (NIL) being used to endorse products and services, without the risk of losing their scholarships or eligibility to participate in their sports.

As we reach the end of the year 2022, we have once again compiled all the links to our Contract Corner blog posts, a regular feature of Tech & Sourcing @ Morgan Lewis. In these posts, members of our global technology, outsourcing, and commercial transactions practice highlight particular contract provisions, review the issues, and propose negotiating and drafting tips.

In a webinar that has value for all technology clients, Morgan Lewis partners Kenneth Davis and Ezra Church will review intellectual property (IP) protection and cyber threats for growing businesses.