Angela L. Dunning 

Angela L. Dunning focuses on commercial, copyright, trade secrets and unfair competition cases as a Cooley LLP IP litigation partner in Silicon Valley. She joined the firm in 2000.

Dunning also handles and supervises numerous asylum matters for individuals in need. She is a recipient of Cooley’s pro bono achievement award.

And she has lectured on trademark law and branding at UC Berkeley School of Law and presents on the IP implications of generative AI at McCarthy Institute conferences.

“One of my Berkeley students has since delighted me by becoming a client,” she said. “Opportunity is everywhere.”

Dunning spoke during a week in mid-May when the U.S. Supreme Court delivered opinions involving patent law, copyright law and social media’s liability protections. She declined to discuss the outcomes in detail, but noted the high court’s rulings. “As an IP litigator, I’m excited when we get our day in the spotlight.”

Among her clients is a generative AI art platform facing a copyright class action by visual artists who allege that Dunning’s client and other companies improperly trained their AI models on billions of images publicly available on the internet, including theirs. Andersen et al. v. Stability AI Ltd. et al., 3:23-cv-00201 (N.D. Cal., filed Jan. 13, 2023).

Dunning represents Midjourney Inc., a San Francisco-based research lab that is one of three defendants in the case. In her motion to dismiss, filed in April, she pointed out that some of the plaintiffs own no copyright registrations at all and that their complaint identifies no image by any plaintiff that was allegedly used as training data.

“This is a first-of-its-kind case, but Cooley has long represented innovators in AI and the machine learning space,” Dunning said. “Midjourney allows users to enter text prompts, which produce stunningly beautiful images.”

Dunning co-led a team that secured a win for Meta Platforms, Inc. in a trademark suit by a Swedish blockchain platform. The plaintiff challenged Meta’s rights to its core logo — stylized blue infinity loops that resemble a Moebius ribbon. Dfinity Foundation v. Meta Platforms Inc., 3:22-cv-02632 (N.D. Cal., filed April 29, 2022).

Senior U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer of San Francisco dismissed all claims and found any likelihood of consumer confusion implausible based on the dissimilarity between the parties’ marks and the sophistication of Dfinity’s tech-savvy customers.

Dunning pointed out that pleading stage dismissals in trademark cases are rare. “More than 1,000 marks exist that incorporate the infinity symbol. Our client was obviously thrilled that their rights were vindicated.”

— John Roemer