Angela Dunning’s practice focuses on trademark, copyright, trade secrets, unfair competition, and other complex commercial litigation for the world’s top companies.

She has tried numerous cases to a jury verdict and has substantial experience in the federal appellate courts, including successful arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in high-profile, published cases.

In 2008, Angela served as an assistant district attorney for the City and County of San Francisco under then-District Attorney Kamala Harris, prosecuting criminal cases. In 2022, she taught trademark law and branding at UC Berkeley School of Law.

Angela joined the firm as a partner in 2023 from another major international law firm.

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Notable Experience

Previous Experience

  • Elliott v. Google, representing Google and procuring a unanimous Ninth Circuit decision affirming summary judgment that the GOOGLE trademark is not generic.

  • Naruto v. Slater, representing Blurb in the “monkey selfies” copyright suit, procuring affirmance of the lower court’s dismissal order on the ground that animals, as non-humans, lack statutory standing under the Copyright Act.

  • Close v. Sotheby’s, representing eBay in obtaining dismissal and affirmance on copyright preemption grounds of claims asserted under the California Resale Royalty Act.

  • 23andMe in a trademark dispute with Ancestry.com over rights to the term “ancestry.”

  • Midjourney, a prominent generative artificial intelligence platform, in connection with a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit asserting copyright, Digital Millennium Copyright Act and right of publicity claims.

  • Meta Platforms, procuring dismissal with prejudice in two different trademark and unfair competition cases—one of which, Dfinity Foundation v. Meta Platforms, was recognized by Law360 as a top trademark decision of 2022.

  • Meta Platforms, in copyright infringement class action cases filed by comedian Sarah Silverman, writer Michael Chabon, and others, arising out of the training and output of Meta’s LLaMA large language generative AI model.

  • Twitter, Visual Supply Company, BGC Partners (Cantor Fitzgerald), Etsy, Olive AI, Wish (ContextLogic), and Playboy Enterprises in various intellectual property litigation matters.

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Publications

Anthropic Wins Transfer to California in AI Copyright Lawsuit

Supreme Court Upholds Refusal to Register “Trump Too Small” Trademark 

Designing a New Standard for the Obviousness of Design Patents 

Supreme Court Declines to Hear Case Seeking Determination as to Whether the “Discovery Rule” Applies to Copyright Act Claims

Supreme Court Allows Copyright Damages Dating Back More Than Three Years (If The Discovery Rule Applies) 

On Authorship, Animals, Humans, and AI 

Fourth Circuit Vacates $1 Billion Damages Award in Music Piracy Lawsuit

European Supervisory Authorities Publish Report on BigTech firms in EU Financial Services 

Training AI models on Synthetic Data: No silver bullet for IP infringement risk in the context of training AI systems (Part 4 of 4) 

Citing Jack Daniel’s, the Ninth Circuit Reverses Itself and Clarifies the Test for Expressive Trademarks

Training AI models on Synthetic Data: No silver bullet for IP infringement risk in the context of training AI systems (Part 3 of 4)

Training AI models on Synthetic Data: No silver bullet for IP infringement risk in the context of training AI systems (Part 2 of 4)

HSU Untied Podcast 

Training AI models on Synthetic Data: No silver bullet for IP infringement risk in the context of training AI systems (Part 1 of 4)

Significant Roadblocks for Plaintiffs in Generative Artificial Intelligence Lawsuit: California Judge Dismisses Most Claims Against AI Developers in Andersen v. Stability AI

White House Unveils Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence

Events