Joseph C. Gratz

San Francisco
Joseph Gratz has a notable track record in AI law, particularly in cases involving cutting-edge technology and intellectual property rights.
He has a longstanding relationship with OpenAI, advising on legal matters related to their research and product offerings, a collaboration that predates the launch of ChatGPT.
Gratz's expertise in AI law first emerged during his tenure as counsel for Google in the Google Books case, which was about scanning all the books in the world to create a book search engine. Gratz said one of the side issues in that case was about what else copyright law permitted one to do with the text of books.
"So, uses for things like machine translation or training an AI to answer factual questions were other examples, like search engines, of things that one could do with the text of books that don't substitute for the copyrightable expression in the books themselves," he said.
In Does v. OpenAI et al., Gratz represents OpenAI in a class action lawsuit under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act concerning generative AI models.
In another case, the plaintiffs, programmers who shared their open-source code on GitHub, contend that the training of AI for Copilot -- a tool developed in collaboration with GitHub to enhance coding efficiency -- constituted improper removal of copyright management information.
In a pair of other separate matters, Gratz is representing OpenAI in a set of cases by authors of books who allege that the text of their books was included in the training data for ChatGPT, and that training on those books infringed copyrights. Tremblay et al. v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. 3:23-cv-03223 (N.D. Cal., filed June 28, 2023). Silverman et al. v. OpenAI, Inc. et al. 3:23-cv-03416 (N.D. Cal., filed July 7, 2023).
"Those cases are still pending, but the questions they raise are important to the future of AI that has a broad and diverse range of knowledge," Gratz said.
Gratz is also representing Stability AI in a case about image generation technology called Stable Diffusion.
"That case is important because it's about whether a computer is allowed to create new art that's inspired by existing art, as long as it doesn't create art that's substantially similar to the existing art."
That case is in its early stages.
Gratz said an obstacle in all these cases is helping judges and courts understand that the laws were written with one kind of technology in mind and now this law has to apply to a variety of new technologies that the lawmakers couldn't have imagined.
"The courts are also determining how to apply these existing laws to new technologies like AI or online marketplaces," he said. "And so, that's the constant challenge. Figuring out the best way to communicate and adapt those pre-existing legal regimes that those court opinions were based on and applying them to new technologies like AI."