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OUR ATTORNEYS ARE KNOWN FOR THEIR KNOWLEDGE ON CUTTING EDGE LEGAL ISSUES, IMPACTING AI X COPYRIGHT X PRIVACY. BELOW ARE EXAMPLES OF AMBART LAW’S THOUGHT LEADERSHIP, MEDIA MENTIONS, AND INTERVIEWS ON THESE TOPICS.
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Bloomberg Law - Disney’s Output Focus Puts Fresh Spin on AI Copyright Litigation
SEPTEMBER 29, 2025
Media mention with AMBART LAW
Disney, Warner Brothers, and other major studios have sued Midjourney and the Chinese AI company MiniMax for copyright infringement, related to their image and video generation services. Both lawsuits focus on the outputs produced by these AI companies, which can create images and now videos with copyrighted-characters. Our founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, spoke with Kyle Jahner, an IP Reporter for Bloomberg Law, on how to evaluate whether AI outputs are infringing and why guardrails are not being used. Developers of AI image-generation tools’ “giant bet is the training is not an infringement, is transformative fair use, and the output we can make all these arguments for why each could be fair use,” Ambartsumian explained.
EXCERPT:
Plaintiffs argued that Midjourney could implement technical controls—such as using filtering technology that blocks prohibited “adult content” and “gore” to also enforce copyrights. Ambartsumian said that would move the company closer to Sony’s legal VCR and further from Grokster’s infringing file-sharing approach. But she said the company obviously doesn’t want to implement such controls because users like using recognizable characters.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON BLOOMBERG LAW
States Newsroom - Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement could set precedent for other AI copyright suits
Media mention with AMBART LAW
SEPTEMBER 11, 2025
Does Anthropic’s $1.5 billion proposed settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic set a precedent for how other AI developers approach AI training? In two interviews with Paige Gross, published in States Newsroom and its affiliates, our founder Yelena Ambartsumian discussed what this proposed settlement could mean and why Judge Alsup instructed the parties to provide more information as he considers whether to approve it.
EXCERPT:
“[American companies] made a bet that, instead of paying for this content, licensing it, which would cost billions of dollars, the bet was okay, ‘we're going to develop these LLMs, and then we'll deal with the fallout, the lawsuits later,” Ambartsumian told States Newsroom about the issue last month.
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But Alsup shared concerns about the settlement in a hearing on Tuesday, saying it was lacking details about the claim process for affected authors and a thorough list of works covered by the deal. [...] “His concern is, okay, we have this huge settlement fund, but we haven't even identified who the claimants are,” Ambartsumian told States Newsroom after the settlement was announced.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON NEWS FROM THE STATES
Forbes - AI Firm To Pay $1.5 Billion For Pirated Books, Keeps Its Trained Models
Media mention with AMBART LAW
SEPTEMBER 8, 2025
Anthropic and a class of copyright holders have reached a proposed settlement, in the Bartz v. Anthropic litigation. If approved, the $1.5 billion settlement would be the largest recovery for copyright infringement in U.S. history. The proposed settlement agreement, submitted to Judge Alsup by the parties, does not require Anthropic to delete its models, trained from the pirated books at issue, but Anthropic will delete the digital libraries of these works that it maintains. At issue are 7 million pirated works, of which, according to the proposed settlement, 500,000 works would meet the class definition (thus resulting in a payout of approximately $3,000 per infringed work). Speaking to business writer Tor Constantino at Forbes, our founder Yelena Ambartsumian explained that this proposed settlement may have a greater impact on licensing fees than the current pending copyright infringement litigations from AI training.
EXCERPT:
“It sounds like a lot of money, and it is, until you remember plaintiffs could recover $150,000 statutory damages per work for willful infringement.” “This isn’t algorithmic disgorgement,” Ambartsumian said. “In copyright law, one of the remedies is the destruction of the infringing work. But that’s not happening here. Because Anthropic gets to keep its models, this settlement can be viewed as a licensing fee.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES
Daily Mail - Can you spot the difference? Fashion model clones herself in bid to beat AI takeover
SEPTEMBER 7, 2025
Media mention with AMBART LAW
The fashion industry uses artificial intelligence technology in many ways. AI startups have been collaborating with brands and models, who license their images and likenesses to create advertisements using AI tools. A gap, however, may exist in how state laws treat these likeness agreements and what federal and state remedies exist for models who have had their image or likeness used, without proper permission.
Speaking to Daily Mail reporter Sophie Gable, our founder Yelena Ambartsumian explained that a model's level of protection over their image and likeness largely depends on their recognition and commercial success. On the celebrity end, more famous models can avail themselves of false endorsement claims under the Lanham Act, a federal law, for campaigns they did not agree to or were not paid for. On the less recognized-end, models will have to largely navigate state laws, regarding the right of privacy and publicity. Many of these state laws, such as New York's, would allow a digital replica to be created if the model had previously provided written consent in an agreement.
Less recognized models and people starting out, without strong representation, often have little to no bargaining power in contracts or the means to understand the implications of what they are agreeing to. Without a high level of detail, someone may not understand the implications of what they are signing away. The technology may evolve in ways that we cannot currently appreciate.
This could be why California's AB 2602, which went into effect at the start of this year, prohibits contracts where people agree to create digital replicas, if the contract does not specify how that contract will be used, or if the person was not represented by legal counsel or a labor representative.
EXCERPT:
‘’Ambartsumian explained that if a model believes an AI-generated image of them was used in a marketing campaign without their consent, it can be increasingly difficult to prove if the content isn't a hyper-realistic digital replica. She added that there is currently a 'patchwork' of laws that can be used to litigate the unwarranted use of AI-generated images…”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON THE DAILY MAIL
eWeek - These AI Smart Glasses Are Always Recording: Experts Weigh in on Risks & Benefits
Media mention with AMBART LAW
SEPTEMBER 4, 2025
The Halo X AI smart glasses, which have been dubbed the "second brain," continuously record what is happening around them, without any indication to passerbys. While the proponents of these glasses contend there are many practical advantages, experts are concerned about the serious risks to privacy and other legal consequences. Our founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, was quoted in an article by tech reporter Megan Crouse at eWeek, which covered compliance concerns with respect to AI smart glasses.
EXCERPT:
A device that constantly records goes against a common-sense practice of data minimization, said Yelena Ambartsumian, the founding attorney at Ambart Law.
“Virtually every company suffers a data breach, and so the ‘convenience’ offered by note-taking or meeting summary devices need to be weighed against the reality that you are providing a third party with your firm’s confidential and proprietary information, as well potentially the personally identifiable information of third parties,” she said.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON EWEEK
Cybernews - AI-powered personalized pricing making waves among shoppers: is it fair?
Media mention with AMBART LAW
AUGUST 23, 2025
Delta Airlines recently revealed plans to expand its use of “personalized algorithmic pricing,” which is when companies use personal data to show a consumer a distinct price. Companies have long used “dynamic pricing”—which is adjusting prices based on certain conditions, such as demand—for ride-sharing apps, airline tickets, and concert tickets. Now, with the increasing amount of information that companies have about consumers (or purchase from data brokers), the identity of the consumer can be one such “condition” in pricing. Our founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, discussed whether personalized algorithm pricing is permitted under U.S. state and federal laws, with Cybernews.
EXCERPT:
Quite surprisingly, personalized pricing isn’t illegal, Yelena Ambartsumian, a New York lawyer and founding attorney of AMBART [LAW PPLC], an art, IP, and information privacy law firm, tells Cybernews.
For example, under a New York law on “Personalized Pricing Transparency and Anti-Discrimination” that took effect in July, companies using your browsing or shopping history to set prices for you must have have the following disclaimer: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON CYBERNEWS
CEB (California Education Board) Daily News - The Future of Fair Use: Will LLMs Have to Pay to Train on Copyrighted Works?
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JULY 21, 2025
After two back-to-back decisions on whether AI training constitutes copyright infringement (or is a “fair use”)—Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta—legal commentators are scrambling to understand the wider implications. This article analyzes recent decisions that recognized the "transformative" use of copyrighted works in the training of AI models as "fair use." Our firm’s founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, discussed with Alexis Keenan, how we can understand these AI-infringement cases within the greater context of the fair use doctrine, in U.S. copyright law.
EXCERPT:
Yelena Ambartsumian, an IP lawyer and founder of AMBART LAW, said neither judge fully explained what made the defendants’ use of copyrighted material in each case so “transformative,” especially considering the commercial aspects of Anthropic’s and Meta’s uses, which are an imperative part of modern fair use analysis.
REWORKED - OpenAI Makes a Play for the Enterprise
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JULY 15, 2025
In an article discussing OpenAI’s new strategy to double down on enterprise clients, David Barry writing for Reworked, spoke to experts and industry veterans about whether this strategy could succeed. Most of the experts interviewed highlighted the importance of oversight and AI governance, including our firm’s founder, Yelena Ambartsumian.
EXCERPT:
“Companies in highly regulated industries are expecting to run local versions of foundation models,” agreed Yelena Ambartsumian, an AI governance and privacy attorney and founder of Ambart Law. “If they can’t, they are very selective about data minimization, and they’re deploying auditing tools to confirm compliance regardless of vendor promises.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON REWORKED
PYMENTS - AI Copyright Battles Continue Despite Meta, Anthropic Wins, Experts Say
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JULY 14, 2025
Despite two recent court decisions finding “fair use” in AI training, the struggle between copyright holders and technology companies continues. In an in-depth article covering the decisions in Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta, and others, Pyments interviewed our firm’s founder Yelena Ambartsumian and asked for her insight on whether these decisions signal a “green light” for AI training.
EXCERPT:
“Although we have two recent decisions from the Northern District of California in which the judges found that Anthropic’s and Meta’s training were fair use because the training of [large language models (LLMs)] was ‘transformative,’ the rulings are rather limited,” Yelena Ambartsumian, founding attorney at Ambart Law, told PYMNTS.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON PYMENTS
Forbes - Judge Backs AI In Copyright Case — Expert Says It Creates More Questions
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JUNE 30, 2025
We now have our first major decision on whether AI training on copyrighted works constitutes copyright infringement or is a “fair use,” a defense to infringement. In Bartz v. Anthropic, plaintiffs argue that their books were used, without permission, to train Anthropic’s Claude AI models. Judge Alsup, in the Northern District of California, found that Anthropic’s training on these works was “transformative” and thus a fair use, except for the libraries of millions of torrented books Anthropic used and retained digital copies of. Speaking to business writer Tor Constantino, at Forbes, our firm’s founder Yelena Ambartsumian explained what she thought about the decision and its impact on one of the most important fair use questions of our time.
EXCERPT:
[Ambartsumian] added that Judge Alsup also disregarded the scope of what was taken. Anthropic didn’t just borrow snippets. It ingested entire books. But instead of addressing that head-on, the court focused on whether Claude needed to use full books or just a subset. The conclusion? Using everything available makes the model better, so it's allowed.
“That’s exactly what I warned about,” Ambartsumian said, referencing her reaction to the Copyright Office’s earlier report on AI training. “The Copyright Office posited that training on massive amounts of diverse works could make a model more robust and thus more likely to be ‘transformative.’ This invites more copying, not less, and could incentivize copyright infringement.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES
Forbes - Hollywood Sues AI Firm for Copying Characters With No License
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JUNE 13, 2025
Disney and Universal brought suit against Midjourney, one of the most widely used generative AI image platforms, alleging Midjourney used their copyrighted characters to train its Stable Diffusion model, without license or permission. Speaking to business writer Tor Constantinto at Forbes, Yelena Ambartsumian explains that Disney and Universal may be concerned about Midjourney’s upcoming video-generation service, which could recreate scenes, or create entirely new scenes, using well-known characters.
EXCERPT:
“Midjourney may have a point — that it’s difficult to know the provenance of the millions of images its diffusion models are trained on,” Ambartsumian told me. “But that’s not an excuse for failing to implement safeguards post-training, after learning that the models can create outputs that likely infringe on copyrighted works. Why Midjourney did not implement those safeguards, before deployment, is baffling to me.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES
Investopedia - What’s Inside the EU AI Act—and What It Means for Your Privacy
Media mention with AMBART LAW
JUNE 13, 2025
Investopedia prepared a thorough article on the EU AI Act, one of the world's most comprehensive laws regulating the use of artificial intelligence, which uses a risk-based approach. In examining whether the EU AI Act applies, Nicole Fallon-Peek spoke to AMBART LAW’s founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, about what U.S. AI companies developing (providing) or deploying in the EU market should prepare for, given the next major compliance deadline on August 2, 2025 for General-Purpose AI models. On that date, companies must meet transparency, documentation, and copyright compliance requirements (including publishing a training content summary). For General-Purpose AI Models placed on the EU market before that date, those providers will have until August 2, 2027 to comply.
EXCERPT:
“U.S. companies must ensure their AI systems meet the transparency and documentation standards set by the EU, which includes providing detailed technical documentation and ensuring proper human oversight,” Ambartsumian said. “Failure to comply could result in penalties, market restrictions, and reputational damage.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON INVESTOPEDIA
Forbes - U.S. Copyright Office Shocks Big Tech with Fair Use Rebuke
Media mention with AMBART LAW
MAY 29, 2025
The U.S. Copyright Office released its third report on copyright and generative AI, focusing on AI infringement, from model training. Tor Constantino, writing for Forbes, discusses the key learnings from the report. He interviewed Yelena Ambartsumian, our firm’s founder, who explained the nuances in the report and what takeaways judges and their clerks may look at, particularly with respect to the novel “market dilution” theory. She also explained why she believes the report’s analysis on transformative use may invite more copying, not less.
EXCERPT:
The Copyright Office outright rejected the most common argument that big tech companies make,” said Ambartsumian. “But paradoxically, it suggested that the larger and more diverse a foundation model's training set, the more likely this training process would be transformative and the less likely that the outputs would infringe on the derivative rights of the works on which they were trained. That seems to invite more copying, not less."
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES
Forbes - The Studio Ghibli Dilemma – Copyright In The Age Of Generative AI
Media mention with AMBART LAW
MAY 6,2025
OpenAI released a new image generation tool, which creates images in the style of the famous anime studio, Studio Ghibli. Writing for Forbes, Tor Constantino examines whether a style can be copyrighted and the legal implications of training on Studio Ghibli’s works, without permission. Our firm’s founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, shared her views, in an in-depth conversation with Constantino.
EXCERPT:
Yelena Ambartsumian, an IP attorney and founder of [AMBART LAW PLLC], agreed. “Many of the images created by OpenAI users are undoubtedly in the style of Studio Ghibli. The fact that we can see these AI-generated images and instantly think ‘Studio Ghibli’ or ‘Hayao Miyazaki’ means that the very same expressive elements have been copied, trained on, and thus used without authorization. Before getting too into the weeds of copyright case law, people should do a gut check. After all, judges and juries are human too, and these cases are often decided on such 'gut’ feelings.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON FORBES
IAPP - Imagine if AI agents planned your next vacation
(Thought leadership by AMBART LAW)
Thought leadership by AMBART LAW
APRIL 2, 2025
Maria Cannon, an associate at AMBART LAW, discusses the future of marketing, which she predicts will be directed to AI agents, instead of humans, and increasingly reliant on generative AI for content. In an article she authored for IAPP, one of the world’s leading privacy organizations, Maria shares her thoughts on best practices for using generative AI in content creation, particularly for creative agencies and advertising agencies.
EXCERPT:
The benefits of using AI to provide marketing services are well documented — Good Apple reports that using AI to provide media services resulted in a 64% increase in cost per acquisition, and Theorem reported a 50% increase in speed of campaign execution.
The unreported statistic is how much time creatives save by using AI to provide marketing services. When AI is used to optimize and accelerate some of the less-glamorous grunt work of building an advertising campaign — including speeding up cycles of predictive research and logging customer reactions and behavior — creatives are free to apply their artistic eye and elevated aesthetic to produce, refine and polish advertising campaigns.
DIGIDAY - How generative AI is changing creator contracts to prevent brand and copyright risks
Media mention with AMBART LAW
MARCH 24, 2025
What are potential legal concerns that creative agencies have with generative AI? In an article for Digiday, Antoinette Sui explores how creators and creative agencies are responding to the rise of generative AI use in content creation and influencer marketing. Our firm’s founder, Yelena Ambartsumian, spoke to Digiday about how agencies are adding provisions to contracts with creators, restricting or narrowly scoping how generative AI is used, in order to reduce the risks associated with copyright infringement
EXCERPT:
Creator contracts and AI terms are part of an evolving conversation as brands and agencies try to proactively get ahead of licensing and copyright problems, said Yelena Ambartsumian, founding attorney at AMBART LAW, which focuses on issues related to intellectual property and copyrights. These could backfire and damage brand reputation if problems arise with the content. “Outputs of generative AI are not copyrightable, because they lack human authorship,” Ambartsumian said. Additionally, AI content poses copyright infringement risks if the AI models are trained on copyrighted material, which is often the case with AI platforms.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON DIGIDAY
HALO x Harvard ILJ - Why the Obsession with Human Creativity? A Comparative Analysis on Copyright Registration of AI-Generated Works
Thought leadership by AMBART LAW
FEBRUARY 21, 2025
Yelena Ambartsumian, founder of AMBART LAW PLLC, and associate Maria Cannon discuss whether works created by an artificial intelligence system can be copyrighted. They explain the human authorship requirement in U.S. Copyright Law, which requires that a human is responsible for the creative expression of a work. Conducting a comparative analysis of copyright laws in the United States, the EU, the UK, China and Japan, they explain that most jurisdictions would bar copywriting an output of generative AI, with some notable exceptions.
EXCERPT:
“While the content that the user provides to the generative AI tool (the input), and the data sets on which the generative AI tool was trained (training data) may consist of copyrighted material, the same is not true for the output—for example, the image that the generative AI tool generates in response to a user’s prompt. For such content to be copyrightable, most jurisdictions, including the United States, require some level of human creativity or originality in the selection and/or modification of the AI-generated content. That means AI-generated work, alone—in response to a human user’s prompt—is not afforded copyright protection.”
READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON HARVARD LAW JOURNALS