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

In a previous post, we highlighted three key items to look out for when assessing the terms and conditions of generative artificial intelligence (“GAI”) tools: training rights, use restrictions and responsibility for outputs. With respect to responsibility for outputs specifically, we detailed Microsoft’s shift away, through its Copilot Copyright Commitment (discussed in greater detail below), from the blanket disclaimer of all responsibility for GAI tools’ outputs that we initially saw from most GAI providers. In the latest expansion of intellectual property protection offered by a major GAI ..read more

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has long expressed a concern about the potential misuse of location data.  For example, in a 2022 blog post, “Location, health, and other sensitive information: FTC committed to fully enforcing the law against illegal use and sharing of highly sensitive data,” the agency termed the entire location data ecosystem “opaque” and has investigated the practices and brought enforcement actions against mobile app operators and data brokers with respect to sensitive data. One such FTC enforcement began with an August 2022 complaint against Kochava, Inc. (“Kochava ..read more

In the first half of 2023, a deluge of new generative artificial intelligence (“GAI”) tools hit the market, with companies ranging from startups to tech giants rolling out new products. In the large language model space alone, we have seen OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s LLaMA, Anthropic’s Claude 2, Microsoft’s Bing AI, and others. A proliferation of tools has meant a proliferation of terms and conditions. Many popular tools have both a free version and a paid version, which each subject to different terms, and several providers also have ‘enterprise’ grade tools available to the largest customers. For ..read more

In recent years there has been a great demand for information about job listings, company reviews and employment data.   Recruiters, consultants, analysts and employment-related service providers, amongst others, are aggressively scraping job-posting sites to extract that type of information. Recall, for example, the long-running, landmark hiQ scraping litigation over the scraping of public LinkedIn data. The two most recent disputes regarding scraping of employment and job-related data were brought by Jobiak LLC (“Jobiak”), an AI-based recruitment platform.  Jobiak filed two ne ..read more

In the rapidly-evolving AI space, the last few days of this week saw significant AI developments occur perhaps even faster than usual.  For example, seven AI companies agreed to voluntary guidelines covering AI safety and security and ChatGPT rolled out a custom preferences tool to streamline usage. In addition, as a related point, Microsoft issued a transparency note for the Azure OpenAI service.  Beyond that, this week saw announcements of a number of generative AI commercial ventures which are not the subject of this post. AI Voluntary Guidelines The White House announced that it ..read more

On July 12, 2023, Nikhil Rathi, the CEO of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) delivered a speech on the FCA’s regulatory approach to Big Tech and Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). Below are some of the key points discussed at the event: The Role of “Big Tech” AI and Market Integrity AI Opportunities The Way Forward Read the full alert here ..read more

In April, we wrote about how OpenAI had eased the procedure by which ChatGPT users can opt out of their inputs being used for model training purposes (click here for that post). While neither web scraping nor the collection of user data to improve services are new concepts, AI did not attract much attention for these practices in prior years. However, with the runaway success of generative AI (“GAI”) tools like ChatGPT, customers ranging from individual consumers to large businesses are starting to take notice of GAI developers’ data supply.[1] In 2023, we’ve seen several lawsuits against Open ..read more