After several weeks of handwringing about the fate of SB 1047 – the controversial AI safety bill that would have required developers of powerful AI models and entities providing the computing resources to train such models to put appropriate safeguards and policies into place to prevent critical harms – California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that ..read more

On September 17, 2024, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 2602 into California law (to be codified at Cal. Lab. Code §927).  The law addresses the use of “digital replicas” of performers.  As defined in the law, a digital replica is: a computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual ..read more

In an ongoing dispute commenced in 2016, the Eleventh Circuit for the second time in the lifetime of the litigation considered trade secret misappropriation and related copyright claims in a scraping case between direct competitors. The case involved plaintiff Compulife Software, Inc. (“Plaintiff” or “Compulife”) – in the business of generating life insurance quotes on ..read more

On May 28, 2024, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law the “Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment” bill (HB24-1121). The legislation expands the state’s 2023  right to repair law, which currently applies to agricultural equipment and powered wheelchairs. Generally, the law will broaden the ability of consumers to repair their own electronic devices themselves or at independent repair providers and restrict manufacturers, absent certain exceptions, from using “parts pairing” or certain software authentication processes that might frustrate independent repairs. The e ..read more

On March 21, 2024, in a bold regulatory move, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (“ELVIS”) Act (Tenn. Code Ann. §47-25-1101 et seq.) – a law which, as Gov. Lee stated, covers “new, personalized generative AI cloning models and services that enable human impersonation and allow users to make unauthorized fake works in the image and voice of others.” The ELVIS Act, which becomes effective on July 1, 2024, is notable in several respects.  Beyond its expansion of the Tennessee right of publicity statute to include protections for musicians’ and o ..read more

On May 9, 2024, a California district court dismissed, with leave to amend, the complaint brought by social media platform X Corp. (formerly Twitter) against data provider Bright Data Ltd. (“Bright Data”) over Bright Data’s alleged scraping of publicly available data from X for use in data products sold to third parties. (X Corp. v. Bright Data Ltd., No. 23-03698 (N.D. Cal. May 9, 2024)).  Proskauer represents Bright Data in this case.  Back in January 2024, a California court in another closely-watched scraping dispute involving breach of contract claims granted summary judgment in ..read more

Generative AI has been most synonymous in the public mind with “AI” since the commercial breakout of ChatGPT in November 2022. Consumers and businesses have seen the fruits of impressive innovation in various generative models’ ability to create audio, video, images and text, analyze and transform data, perform Q&A chatbot functions, and write code, to name a few functions. Still, so far AI chatbots have been mostly contained to the confines of a chat window. Although a basic generative AI tool could recommend top-rated hotels for your weekend getaway plans, it will (as of the date of this ..read more

Late last year, Chegg Inc. (“Chegg”), an online learning platform, obtained a preliminary injunction based on allegations that the various operators of the Homeworkify website (“Defendants”) – which allows users to view Chegg’s paywalled solutions without creating an account – violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). (Chegg Inc. v. Doe, No. 22-07326 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 7, 2023)). In addition to finding a likelihood of success on relatively novel CFAA claims (at least for a scraping dispute) that involved alleged stolen user credentials and a retaliatory denial-of-service (DDos) attack, th ..read more

Last week, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Team, a flexible subscription structure for small-to-medium sized businesses (with two or more users) that are not large enough to warrant the expense of a ChatGPT Enterprise subscription (which requires a minimum of 150 licensed users).  Despite being less expensive than its Enterprise counterpart, ChatGPT Team provides for the use of the latest OpenAI models with the robust privacy, security and confidentiality protections that previously only applied to the ChatGPT Enterprise subscription and which are far more protective than the terms that govern ..read more

Flight and travel data has always been valuable for data aggregators and online travel services and has prompted litigation over the years. Latest suit from Air Canada against a rewards travel search site raises some interesting liability issues under the CFAA. The implications of this case, if the plaintiffs are successful, could impact the legal analysis of web scraping in a variety of circumstances, including for the training of generative AI models. In a recent post, we recounted the myriad of issues raised by recently-filed data scraping suits involving job listings, company reviews and ..read more