Implicit Bias in Intellectual Property Law

Implicit bias is assessed here by looking at our three major areas of IP law—copyright, patent, and trademark—and discussing the required issues of implicit bias through the lens of a survey of our IP laws.

In this program, intellectual property lawyer Peter Afrasiabi takes you on a fun, interesting journey asking these questions:

• Does copyright law and fair use, as it collides with modern AI technologies, require us to assess implicit bias in the stock of material that AI is learning from, and whether fair use and copyright law need to take that into account in deciding the AI fair use questions being litigated?
• Do the large differentials in male to female inventor patent grant rates, and the differential in male to female patent examiners, create implicit bias in the patent system, especially where we have elastic patentability concepts on abstract ideas?
• Do our trademark laws’ central focus on the archetypal “consumer” create their own bias issues by not seeing the “consumer” as an actual person?

These and other interesting implicit bias issues, with strategies to combat implicit bias, are addressed.