By Mark Seavy 

As the brand licensing industry turns the corner into 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to become further imbedded in the business, raising IP issues that will linger long past the new year. 

As a result, significant questions—and challenges—will remain for IP rights holders across publishing, music, entertainment, and many other industries.  

There have been multiple lawsuits filed against AI companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Stability AI, and Anthropic, all of them alleging copyright infringement for using content to train models without a license. And while AI is revolutionizing many industries, it is also likely to continue to raise issues around trademarks and copyrights. 

For example, 13 record companies sued music-generating AI company Suno in June for copyright infringement  alleging the company was using their music to train its AI model. Suno responded in November by unveiling a new version of its AI music tool that “takes music creation to the next level.” Suno has argued that using AI music as part of a “backend technological process that is invisible to the public” to create a “non-infringing product” is “fair use” under U.S. copyright law. 

At the crux of many suits is that, in the U.S., prompt-generated content isn’t eligible for copyright protection, which is needed for songs and cover art, Chris Horton, VP of Strategic Technology at Universal Music Group told Music Ally. That led UMG to direct musicians away from AI-created images for cover art for their albums, he said.  

“Development will continue at pace, but I hope licensing, litigation, and legislation will eventually align so that all AI companies see that cooperation with creative industries is the obvious path forward,” Horton said. “This will unlock new investments and businesses, leading to even more products and services.”  

Investment in AI is likely to further pick up speed in 2025. Reddit, a platform that hosts more than 100,000 active communities engaging in discussions, voting, and sharing content, forged a partnership with OpenAI in May to increase search capabilities and improve the user experience by surfacing relevant discussions and content across its forums. It also announced a partnership with OpenAI in May for training AI models.  

Publisher HarperCollins, meanwhile, forged a deal with Microsoft to license nonfiction backlist titles for training AI models. The voluntary program offers authors $2,500 per book in exchange for a three-year licensing agreement. The deal is part of a growing trend of publishers working with tech firms to integrate AI with content.  

“The difference between the next 18 to 24 months and the last 18 to 24 months is that AI is moving undercover,” said Mike Bechtel, Managing Director and Chief Futurist at Deloitte Consulting. “What we’re seeing is that it’s sort of melting into becoming the foundation or sub-structure of all the other business-oriented things that we need to do and think about. For the last two years, it felt like AI was a monolithic thing—one chat window for all our needs and all our curiosities. Now what we are starting to see is this fractal explosion where it’s going to be Ais, plural—dozens and then hundreds and, eventually, thousands of domain-specific agents trained on domain-specific data.” 

This further expansion of AI will hinge not only on technology, but also the rules global governments implement to regulate it. AI companies have expected the U.S. Congress to pass federal legislation for years but, so far, the effort has only produced recommendations and reports. And President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to rescind President Joe Biden’s sweeping AI executive order that was implemented last fall to protect people’s rights and safety without stifling innovation.  

In Europe, the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act took effect in August based on a forward-looking definition of AI and a risk-based approach. And the Australian government released a proposal this past fall setting 10 mandatory guardrails for AI developers. 

“There is a real uncertainly around the legal basis on which those generative AI platforms are built,” Tim Clark, a partner at the law firm PiperAlderman, said during Licensing International’s recent “A Chat About the Use of Generative AI in Australia” webinar. “We are going to have to be careful where we use these platforms because there are new ones coming out all the time, along with new versions of existing platforms.”