Beckman Law is proud to announce that Christopher Beckman, our Managing Partner, has been recognized in IAM 300: The World’s Leading IP Strategists.  IAM 300 is one of the highest honors in the field of Intellectual Property, highlighting only the “best of the best” – the most exceptional Intellectual Property professionals, as determined by Intellectual property market sources, including companies, law firms, IP brokers, and other players in the intellectual property field. 

In IAM’s words, Chris’ “corporate strategy and business-minded IP advice is like gold dust for emerging companies.”

This is the 6th year in a row that Chris has received the IAM 300 award, and he was also recognized as a Strategy 300 Global Leader in 2026.

Just this week, Getty Images sued the makers of Stable Diffusion, an artificial intelligence system (“AI”) that creates art based on existing artwork, like Getty’s. Long before this copyright lawsuit, the line between artistic “influence” and infringement had been a blurry one, but some think the very paper it’s written on is disappearing.

The U.S. began losing its grip on copyright with an earlier groundbreaking technology heralded by Napster, the “file sharing” (and copyright infringing) web application that seemingly everyone had in the early 2000s. And the music industry has never been the same since.

Might AI-art be the next chapter in technology-fueled erosion of artists’ rights, where a promising new technology winds up disrupting, not enhancing, creativity?

The first time I saw a multi-million-dollar “Masterpiece” by Roy Lichtenstein, a supreme painter from the Pop Art movement, I had the same thought as almost everyone: Isn’t this just a comic?
Now, I like comics, and think they’re fun all blown up and framed, mock-seriously, on the office wall. But they’re a dime-a-dozen, not millions a pop (even in Pop Art).
As quickly as that silly thought popped up in my mind, it popped away. Of course not! The entire art world would not be duped into shelling out hundreds of lifetime salaries each for simple enlarged comic strips. It must be some other intellectual statement, based on the underlying concept of comic books. Something deeper, I didn’t understand. Something so subtle, I needed an expert to explain it to me.