Artificial Intelligence and Trademark Infringement: Legal Interpretation of “Use” of AI-Generated signs in The European Union
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.69971/tipr.4.2.2026.98Keywords:
trademark infringement, AI platforms, AI-Generated signs, intellectual property rightsAbstract
Organizations are increasingly utilizing AI-powered tools to design signs and build brand identities. Technologies such as text-based generators Copy.AI and WriteSonic, along with image-based tools like MidJourney, LogoJoy, and HatchFul, are transforming the way signs are created. Trademark as an intellectual property right (IPR) essentially enables business owners to use their marks as a signal to consumers. These rights become exercisable when a third party’s use affects the functions of the mark, particularly its essential function of guaranteeing the origin of goods, services, quality and serving as a commercial communication tool. As more businesses adopt AI to create signs, recommend or make purchases for consumers, and promote competing offers, the traditional functions of trademarks are increasingly being challenged. AI platforms leverage algorithms trained on extensive datasets including registered trademarks to generate new designs for signs, sometimes successfully imitating or even duplicating registered trademarks owned by others. More infringing signs can be generated at a rapid speed, and its challenging to trace accountable entity in this situation. AI platforms for logo and sign generation are built to reproduce logos and signs as its service and the users only instruct the AI through prompts and keywords that the machine can recognize because it already has the protected data inputted in it. Third party users do not even know in advance the exact design the platform will produce, as this relies on mechanical processing of data patterns. It is therefore challenging to attribute ownership of the generated output solely to the user who provides the prompt. It is important to re-evaluate the role of AI platforms and provide a clear guideline for what constitutes use and who will bear responsibility for such use. This research investigates the evolving definition of “use” under European trademark law and analyzes how legal liability for trademark infringements involving AI-generated content may be allocated; among the AI developer, the user, and the platform hosting the tool.
Downloads
References
AB Europe, and Microsoft Advertising. 2024. Understanding the Adoption and Application of AI in Digital Advertising. IAB Europe. https://iabeurope.eu/wp-content/uploads/IAB-Europe-and-Microsoft-AI-in-Digital-Advertising-Report-2024.pdf
Agostinelli, Andrea, Timo I. Denk, Zalan Borsos, Jesse Engel, Marco Verzetti, Antoine Caillon, Qingqing Huang, Aren Jansen, Adam Roberts, Matteo Tagliasacchi, Marco Tagliasacchi, Matt Sharifi,Neil Zeghidour,and Christian Frank.2023. MusicLM: Generating Music from Text. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11325
Arcidiacono, Daniele. 2025. Interpreting EU Trademark Law in the Era of AI-Driven Behavioural Advertising and Digital Marketplaces. SSRN. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5346530
Biesmann, Matthias. 2024. AI, the New Frontier: An Analysis on Trademark Litigation Strategies in the Face of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Marquette Intellectual Property & Innovation Law Review 29 (1): 33-52.
Chen, Mark, Jerry Tworek, Heewoo Jun, Qiming Yuan, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Jared Kaplan, Harri Edwards, Yuri Burda, Nicholas Joseph, Greg Brockman, et al. 2021. Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.03374
Curtis, Louise, and Rachel Platts. 2020. Trademark Law Playing Catch-Up with Artificial Intelligence? WIPO Magazine, June 30. https://www.wipo.int/web/wipo-magazine/articles/trademark-law-playing-catch-up-with-artificial-intelligence-55800
Design.com. n.d. Logo Generator | Create Your Free Logo. Accessed July 30, 2025. https://www.design.com/s/logo
Dormehl, Luke. 2017. Thinking Machines: The Quest for Artificial Intelligence and Where It’s Taking Us Next. New York: Tarcher Perigee.
European Council. 1993. Council Regulation (EC) No 40/94 of 20 December 1993 on the Community Trade Mark. Official Journal of the European Communities L 11: 1–26. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/1994/40/oj
European Parliament and Council. 2000. Directive 2000/31/EC of 8 June 2000 on Certain Legal Aspects of Information Society Services, in Particular Electronic Commerce, in the Internal Market (E-Commerce Directive). Official Journal of the European Communities L 178: 1–16. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX%3A32000L0031
European Parliament and Council. 2015. Directive (EU) 2015/2436 of 16 December 2015 to Approximate the Laws of the Member States Relating to Trade Marks (Recast). Official Journal of the European Union L 336: 1–26. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2015/2436/oj
European Parliament and Council. 2017. Regulation (EU) 2017/1001 of 14 June 2017 on the European Union Trade Mark (Codification). Official Journal of the European Union L 154: 1–99. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2017/1001/oj
European Union, Eurostat. 2024. Artificial Intelligence by Economic Activity (NACE Rev. 2). Accessed October 9, 2025. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat
European Union. 2019. Directive (EU) 2019/790 of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market and Amending Directives 96/9/EC and 2001/29/EC. Official Journal of the European Union L 130: 92–125. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32019L0790
European Union. 2024. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of 13 June 2024 Laying Down Harmonised Rules on Artificial Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act). Official Journal of the European Union L 253/1. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj
Garcia, Thania. 2023. David Guetta Replicated Eminem’s Voice in a Song Using Artificial Intelligence. Variety. https://variety.com/2023/music/news/david-guetta-eminem-artificial-intelligence-1235516924/
Goodfellow, Ian J., Jean Pouget-Abadie, Mehdi Mirza, Bing Xu, David Warde-Farley, Sherjil Ozair, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio. 2014. Generative Adversarial Nets. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 27: 2672–2680. https://doi.org/10.1145/3422622
Melendez, Carlos. 2019. How Do You Know If What You’re Buying or Building Is Truly IP? Forbes Tech Council, July 11. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/07/11/how-do-you-know-if-what-youre-buying-or-building-is-truly-ip/
Metz, Cade. 2023. Instant Videos Could Represent the Next Leap in A.I. Technology. The New York Times, April 4. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/04/technology/runway-ai-videos.html
O’Brien, Matt. 2023. Tech Companies Try to Take AI Image Generators Mainstream with Better Protections against Misuse. Associated Press, September 21. https://apnews.com/article/ai-image-generators-falle-microsoft-paint-adobe-firefly-ad707255b6350502d049512cf86ed7fa.
OpenAI. 2023a. GPT-4 Technical Report. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774
OpenAI. 2023b. How Should AI Systems Behave, and Who Should Decide? https://openai.com/blog/how-should-ai-systems-behave
Pila, Justine, and Paul Torremans. 2019. European Intellectual Property Law. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reisenbichler, Martin, Thomas Reutterer, David A. Schweidel, and Daniel Dan. 2022. Frontiers: Supporting Content Marketing with Natural Language Generation. Marketing Science 41 (3): 441–452. https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2021.1324
Rombach, Robin, Andreas Blattmann, Dominik Lorenz, Patrick Esser, and Björn Ommer. 2022. High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 10684–10695. https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52688.2022.01042
Rosati, Eleonora. 2024. Infringing AI: Liability for AI-Generated Outputs under International, EU, and UK Copyright Law. European Journal of Risk Regulation. https://doi.org/10.1017/err.2024.72
Senftleben, Martin. 2022. Trademark Law, AI-Driven Behavioral Advertising, and the Digital Services Act: Toward Source and Parameter Trans-parency for Consumers, Brand Owners, and Competitors. In Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence, edited by Ryan Abbott, 309–324. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800881907.00023
Tran, Bao. 2025. The Future of AI in Trademark Law: Trends to Watch in 2025. https://patentpc.com/blog/the-future-of-ai-in-trademark-law-trends-to-watch-in-2025
Visconti, Raffaele M. 2020. The Valuation of Digital Intangibles: Technology, Marketing and Internet. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36918-7
Wang, Zifan, Chen Chen, Vasisht Sehwag, Mingyang Pan, and Lingjuan Lyu. 2024. Evaluating and Mitigating IP Infringement in Visual Generative AI. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04662
World Intellectual Property Organization. 1967. Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, Article 6bis. https://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/paris/
World Intellectual Property Organization. n.d. Trademarks. Accessed July 30, 2025. https://www.wipo.int/en/web/trademarks
World Intellectual Property Organization. n.d. WIPO AI Tools. https://www.wipo.int/en/web/ai-tools-services/ipos-initiatives
Ziegler, Daniel M., Nisan Stiennon, Jeffrey Wu, Tom B. Brown, Alec Radford, Dario Amodei, Paul Christiano, and Geoffrey Irving. 2019. Fi-ne-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferences. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.08593
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Authors
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
