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Intellectual Property

BUL 2241Activity 12

Why it Matters

A company’s most valuable assets are often ones no one can touch: its brand, its designs, its software, its formulas. Four main bodies of law protect them, and each sets its own terms for what it covers, when protection begins, and when it ends. So the first question about any asset is which law protects it. Patents, registered trademarks, and registered copyrights all sit in public records that anyone can search. In this activity you find intellectual property in your own home, verify it in those records, and test what the law says about a work a machine helped make.

Current Context

On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to review Thaler v. Perlmutter (opens in a new tab), leaving in place the District of Columbia Circuit’s holding (opens in a new tab) that the Copyright Act requires a human author. Stephen Thaler had listed an AI system, the Creativity Machine, as the sole author of a picture it made, so the Copyright Office refused to register it. The Office does register work made with AI when a person adds enough expression: by early 2025 it had registered hundreds of such works (opens in a new tab), covering only the human’s part. Its study of copyright and AI (opens in a new tab) finds that, with today’s technology, a prompt alone makes no one an author; whether training AI on copyrighted works is fair use remains unsettled. So a copyright in the image you generate in Part 3 can reach only what you add to it, and no one holds a copyright in the rest.

Key Concepts

Copyright protects the expression in original works of authorship, such as books, music, software, and films, but never the ideas or processes behind them. Protection begins automatically the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, though an owner generally must register the work with the Copyright Office before suing for infringement. For an individual author it lasts for life plus seventy years.

Trademark

A trademark is a name, logo, or slogan that tells buyers who stands behind a product or service. Rights begin with use in commerce, and federal registration, which the ® symbol announces, adds nationwide protection against confusingly similar marks. A trademark can last indefinitely: the rights continue while it stays in use, and a registration can be renewed every ten years.

Patent

A patent is a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention, granted only after the Patent and Trademark Office finds it new, useful, and not obvious. A utility patent covers how something works and runs twenty years from filing; a design patent covers how it looks and runs fifteen years from grant. The price is disclosure: the patent must teach others in the field to make and use the invention, which anyone may use once the term ends.

Trade Secret

A trade secret is business information, such as a formula, a process, or a customer list, that has value because it is not generally known. No agency grants it: the owner keeps it by taking reasonable steps such as nondisclosure agreements and restricted access, and it lasts as long as the secret holds. It gives no protection against a competitor who discovers the secret independently or by taking apart a product bought on the open market.

Fair Use

Fair use is a defense to copyright infringement that permits some use of a protected work without permission, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, and parody. Courts weigh four factors case by case: the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount taken, and the effect on the market for the original. A business that quotes a review or mocks a rival’s ad may rely on it, but no one can be sure in advance how a court will weigh the factors.

Infringement

Infringement is the unauthorized use of someone else’s protected intellectual property: pirating a video, manufacturing a patented invention, or putting a confusingly similar logo on competing goods. Depending on the right, the owner can ask a court for an injunction, the seizure or destruction of infringing goods, and money damages. When a copyright was registered in time, willful infringement can bring statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work, enough to end a small business.

Human Authorship

Human authorship is the rule that copyright protects only work created by a human being. A work an AI system generates on its own cannot be registered, while a work with enough human creative contribution can be, with the machine-generated parts disclaimed. The rule decides who, if anyone, owns the image you create in Part 3.

Resources

What to Do

Checking a claim of ownership against the official record, rather than trusting the symbol on a label, is basic intellectual property work, and this activity builds that habit. You find intellectual property in your own home, verify each registration in the federal databases, and use an AI to explore who owns an image it generates. The photos, the screenshots, the image, and a short reflection go up together in one post.

Part 1: The Physical Scavenger Hunt

Walk through your home and find objects that carry different kinds of intellectual property. Photograph one item protected by copyright, such as a book, a video game case, or a DVD. Then photograph one item bearing a registered trademark; look for the ® symbol on household goods or clothing. Last, photograph one patented item, with “Patent No.” stamped on a tool, an appliance, or an electronic device. You should end up with three separate photos. If you wonder why a company bothered to protect one of your items, the Protection Strategist will explain the business reason.

Part 2: The Public Database Verification

Verify the legal status of each item in the database that holds its record. Search the trademark in the USPTO Trademark Search, the copyright in the Copyright Office Public Records System, and the patent in Patent Public Search or Google Patents. The databases can be confusing, so let the Database Navigator help you structure each search, and check its advice against the official help pages in Resources. Take a screenshot of the official search result confirming the registration of each of your three items.

The law on AI and intellectual property is still moving, so treat what an AI tells you about it as a lead to check. Use the AI Ownership Explorer to discuss who owns an image a machine generates and what the Copyright Office and the courts have decided. Check every case or decision the AI names against the Copyright Office’s AI page in Resources. At the end of the conversation, have the AI generate an image from a creative theme you supply, such as a cyberpunk university library at night, and save it. For more practice, the Infringement Simulator walks you through IP decisions at a fictional company.

Part 4: Post Your Deliverable

Create a new discussion thread and upload your three item photos, your three database screenshots, and the AI-generated image from Part 3. Below the images, write a reflection of at least 100 words on searching the government databases. Say what you learned and what challenges you ran into, and judge whether the AI gave you accurate legal context about the copyright status of the image it generated.

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Suggested AI Prompts

Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.

Database Navigator

Act as a paralegal who specializes in intellectual property research. I need to look up three items in federal databases: a copyright in the U.S. Copyright Office Public Records System, a trademark in the USPTO’s Trademark Search system, and a patent in Google Patents or the USPTO’s Patent Public Search. Guide me step by step through each database: what to type in the search bar, how to filter results to a specific brand or patent number, and how to recognize the record that confirms a registration. If you are not sure how a particular screen currently works, say so and point me to the official help page instead of guessing.

Procedural guidance with an honesty clause. Search screens change after a model’s training ends, so the prompt makes it flag uncertainty and point you to the official help pages, as a careful paralegal would.

AI Ownership Explorer

Act as an intellectual property law professor. Guide me through an interactive session on whether AI-generated images are protected by copyright under current U.S. law. Start by asking me what I think about authorship and AI use. Once I answer, analyze my thinking using current legal principles and explain who owns the copyright, if anyone, in an image generated by a machine. Describe the key decisions by the Copyright Office and the courts, naming each with enough detail that I can find it, and tell me plainly if you are unsure whether a decision exists or what it held. Then help me generate a creative image from a theme I give you, and explain what I need to keep in mind if I want to use or publish that image commercially.

Socratic opening plus a hallucination check. Giving your view first makes the session a dialogue, and requiring the model to name each decision so you can look it up, or admit doubt, guards against invented cases.

Infringement Simulator

Act as an interactive intellectual property simulator for college students. Begin by inventing a fictional business in any industry and presenting a scenario with one or more IP problems, such as a patent dispute, a trademark infringement, or a stolen trade secret. I will play a decision maker at the company and choose how to respond. After each decision, give me immediate feedback: whether the choice was legally sound, a brief explanation referencing the relevant U.S. law, and a short rationale in plain language. Then advance the scenario with a new complication based on my choice.

Role play with a feedback loop. Every decision gets an immediate legal evaluation, so you learn what a choice costs while you are making it, and each new complication keeps the practice from repeating.

Protection Strategist

Act as a corporate strategy consultant. I am going to describe one of the physical items from my IP scavenger hunt: the patented item, the trademarked item, or the copyrighted item. Explain the business strategy behind why the company chose to protect that asset and how holding that specific intellectual property right gives it a financial advantage over competitors. Wait for me to describe my item.

Reframing from law to strategy. Seen as a business decision rather than a legal category, the same object shows why a company pays to protect it and what the protection earns.

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