Matthew Butt­erick: lawyer

Meet the Lawyer Leading the Human Resis­tance Against AI (Wired) The activist who’s taking on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in the courts: ‘This is the fight of our lives’ (El País) AI’s Billion-Dollar Copy­right Battle Starts With a Font Designer (Bloomberg) Scraping or Stealing? A Legal Reck­oning Over AI Looms (Holly­wood Reporter) Is AI Art Stealing from Artists? (New Yorker) Lawsuit Takes Aim at the Way AI Is Built (New York Times) AI art tools Stable Diffu­sion and Midjourney targeted with copy­right lawsuit (The Verge) New ChatGPT Lawsuits May Be Start of AI’s Legal Shit­storm (Rolling Stone) Google sued by US artists over AI image gener­ator (Reuters) Authors file a lawsuit against OpenAI for unlaw­fully ingesting their books (Guardian) Artists claim big win in copy­right suit fighting AI image gener­a­tors (Ars Tech­nica)

I’m an author, typog­ra­pher, programmer, and lawyer. Like millions of other authors, artists, and program­mers, my work was copied for the training datasets of commer­cial gener­a­tive-AI systems without consent, credit, or compen­sa­tion. The tech world told us to adapt. Wish granted—after 12 years away, I reac­ti­vated my law license and invented the first set of cases in the US chal­lenging the legality of gener­a­tive AI. I now serve as co-counsel, repre­senting fellow authors, artists, and program­mers. I also provide legal and tech­nical research and consulting to other law firms. I have served as an expert witness on typo­graphic matters. I have a visual-studies degree from Harvard Univer­sity and a law degree from UCLA. I live in Los Angeles with my wife Jessica, an appel­late lawyer.

photo: Tag Christof

Doe v. GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI Andersen v. Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway, DeviantArt In re OpenAI ChatGPT Liti­ga­tion Kadrey v. Meta Nazemian v. NVIDIA O’Nan v. Data­bricks In re Google Gener­a­tive AI Copy­right Liti­ga­tion

Before law school, I had a career as a typo­graphic designer. Starting in 2008, I combined my inter­ests in law and typog­raphy. I created the website and book Typog­raphy for Lawyers and designed the MB Type font library, both of which are now used by thou­sands of lawyers and judges world­wide. My font Equity is used for published opin­ions by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the Court of Appeals of Georgia. The Seventh Circuit recently wrote “believe Butt­erick. His book and web site include many exam­ples of what to emulate—and what to avoid.” Asyma­Design, LLC v. CBL & Assocs. Mgmt., Inc., 103 F.4th 1257, 1261 (7th Cir. 2024).

Equity Century Supra Valkyrie Concourse Heliotrope Advo­cate Trip­li­cate
mb@butt­er­icklaw.com