Lawyer Ex Machina #46 - Summer ed. - July 2023
AI - Lawsuits
P.M. v. OpenAI LP (3:23-cv-03199) [Docket]
Focus of lawsuit: personal data/data privacy
Stories: Legal Dive | Search Engine Journal
J. L. et al v. Alphabet, Inc. et al (3:23:03440) [Docket]
Focus of the lawsuit: data privacy, copyright infringement
Stories: Bloomberg Law | Reuters | CBS News
Related: Google recently amended its privacy policy to clarify that it used public data scraped from the web in its AI services, including Bard.
Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc. (3:23-cv-03223) [Docket]
Focus of the lawsuit: copyright infringement (authors)
Stories: CNET | CNBC | Bloomberg Law [$]
Silverman et al v. OpenAI (3:23-cv-03416) and Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (3:23-cv-03417)
Focus of the lawsuits: copyright infringement (authors)
Stories: LA Times | Rolling Stone | Bloomberg Law [$]
(Just to clarity, there are separate suits against OpenAI and Meta by the same three authors)
General commentary: Rolling Stone
AI - General
The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into OpenAI as to “unfair or deceptive privacy or data security practices” and “unfair or deceptive practices related to risks of harm to consumers, including reputational harm” arising from the development and deployment of the company’s AI models.
From Wired [$]: Generative AI in Games Will Create a Copyright Crisis
Last month, Thomson Reuters announced the acquisition of legal research company Casetext for $650 million. Thomson Reuters execs justified the acquisition to institutional investors by arguing, “Casetext’s early access to OpenAI’s GPT-4 model and its experience in working with legal data gave them a head start in developing the know-how and experience to engineer generative AI products, and that experience will help accelerate TR’s own generative AI strategy.”
A self-represented litigant in a civil case in the UK presented cases generated by ChatGPT that proved to be either non-existent or with fabricated text.
Related: Carolyn Elefant has recorded a head-to-head comparison between ChatGPT and Casetext’s CoCounsel on handling legal research tasks.
OpenAI has turned off the Browse with Bing feature on GPT4.0, that allowed searchers to access the web in real-time to answer queries, in part because users found that the feature could scale paywalls and provide the full text of articles.
From The Washington Post [$]: “A billionaire-backed movement is recruiting college students to fight killer AI, which some see as the next Manhattan Project”
(Ed. Note: fascinating but perhaps not entirely safe for work) From Wired [$]: “Deepfake Porn Reveals a ‘Pervert’s Dilemma'”
Related - From Bloomberg Law [$]: “Deepfake Porn, Political Ads Push States to Curb Rampant AI Use”
Blockchain
The court overseeing the SEC v. Ripple case has ruled that certain sales of the Ripple token XKR, particularly those on crypto exchanges, did not “[constitute] an unregistered offer and sale of investment contracts,” thus granting partial summary judgment to the company. [Order]
The SEC has settled with the cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, including a $4.7 billion judgement against the company; founder and former CEO Alex Mashinsky,, was arrested and charged with fraud” [Reuters | CNBC]
Data Privacy
From Wired [$]: “A court used an app called Covenant Eyes to surveil the family of a man released on bond. Now he’s back in jail, and tech misuse may be to blame.
A massive data breach, arising from a vulnerability of a very popular file transfer tool called MOVEit, has so far affected banks, universities, hospitals, law firms, government agencies, major corporations, and more:
A joint report by a number of Congressional offices have published an investigative report on claims that major tax preparation companies “recklessly” shared taxpayer information with tech companies, especially Meta; the report finds that the tax prep firms were “shockingly careless with their treatment of taxpayer data” and the tech firms acted “with stunning disregard for taxpayer privacy.” [The Markup | Report]
Reps. Warren Davidson (R-Oh.) and Sarah Jacobs (D-Cal.) have introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024 that to prohibit “federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies from purchasing Americans’ location information, web browsing history, internet search history, or any other information protected by the Fourth Amendment.” [Brennan Center | Wired [$]]
From Engadget: “the European Union has adopted a plan that will allow US tech giants to continue storing data about European users on American soil”
Miscellaneous
The European Commission has released its strategy for promoting and regulating the development of virtual worlds, which it calls Web 4.0 and strenuously resists calling ‘the metaverse’.
From Politico: “Chinese-based hackers gained access to the emails of the U.S. State Department last month through a vulnerability in Microsoft email systems, a department spokesperson said Wednesday.”
Events
July 26, 2023 - 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. EDT: Join the Copyright Office for a discussion on global perspectives on copyright and AI. Leading international experts will discuss how other countries are approaching copyright questions such as authorship, training, exceptions and limitations, and infringement. They will provide an overview of legislative developments in other regions and highlight possible areas of convergence and divergence involving generative AI.