Tech Insights.
Read our legal insights on IP and industry issues written by our team.
A significant privacy enforcement action out of California: the California Attorney General and four District Attorneys have proposed a $12.75 million settlement with GM over the alleged sale and retention of drivers’ data. In this article, Stephanie Alvarez Salgado explains why the case matters—and why data minimization is emerging as a concrete compliance obligation, not merely a policy principle.
Who is the “volitional actor” when an AI system generates allegedly infringing output?
That question is central to ongoing copyright litigation against Anthropic and Perplexity. The platforms argue that users are responsible because outputs are generated in response to user prompts. Plaintiffs argue that platforms are responsible because they control training data, model architecture, and output constraints. Both positions draw on established copyright law, yet each captures only part of the causal chain.
The problem is that the volitional conduct doctrine was built for a different technological era: photocopiers, DVRs, and passive internet intermediaries where copying was discrete and attributable to a single actor. Generative AI does not work that way. There is also a growing tension in case law: if prompting may be insufficient to establish copyright authorship, can it nevertheless establish volitional conduct for direct liability?
In this new article, Chieh Tung explores why the traditional user-versus-system framework maps poorly onto AI systems where control is distributed across training, design, deployment, and prompting.
This week, the Supreme Court clarified the standard for contributory copyright infringement liability for service providers. In unanimously holding that knowledge alone is insufficient, but rather that liability requires intent shown through either inducement or provision of services tailored to infringement, the Court's decision could have far-reaching effects on the future of the contributory infringement analysis. In this article, Ciara McHale and Jonathan Downing delve into this decision and what it may mean going forward.