Volume-25.3-Front-Pages ..read more

Haque-Final This Article examines the challenges and prospects of crowd‑sourcing generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) systems in patent law as human and machine creativity become seamless. As GenAI technologies like GPT-4 become ubiquitous, AI-generated solutions will be less innovative and will complicate tenets about patentability. An evolution of patent law’s non-obviousness standard provides an elegant solution––borrowing from philosophy, a “razor”––to address the impact of advanced artificial intelligence (“AI”) on the innovation process. This Article’s thesis is distinct from the ..read more

Kivus-Final The Article discusses the challenges and implications of applying existing copyright law to a subset of artificial intelligence (“AI”) that creates new data known as generative AI (“Generative AI”). Specifically, the Article examines the mismatch between copyright law and the unique legal complexities that arise from the training and use of Generative AI. The Article argues that this mismatch could lead to an increased privatization of copyright enforcement.  Additionally, this Article discusses: (1) copyright law fundamentals crucial to understanding the law’s application to ..read more

Villasenor-Final  Artificial intelligence (“AI”) systems can operate in ways that their designers may not fully understand. This creates a series of important questions regarding trade secrets. This Article argues that AI system designers should be able to hold trade secret rights in AI algorithms even when they are unable to articulate how those algorithms operate. However, to assert a misappropriation claim, trade secret owners must be able to acquire information enabling them to describe the algorithm at issue in sufficient detail. This Article also explores compliance with regulatory ..read more

Last summer, UNC’s law journals tasked prospective student staff members with writing a note. The subject was to be State v. Gaddis, a criminal case involving a finding of harmless error. The harmless error doctrine holds that when a trial court errs, but the error does not affect the case’s outcome, an appellate court will not reverse the trial court’s decision. This doctrine is controversial. We can never know for certain what would have happened without an error. The safest option would be to remand every case where a trial judge erred for a new trial. But this would be inef ..read more

Understanding Litigation Finance Litigation finance is when a third-party invests in a lawsuit in hopes of sharing in the profits of a successful verdict. A recent survey found that more than forty U.S. litigation finance companies exist. This survey, conducted over the course of one calendar year, found that these firms invested $2.33 billion in capital to litigation matters. Plaintiffs often pursue litigation funding when they themselves cannot afford the out-of-pocket expenses of litigation.  During an interview with Harvard Law School’s Center on the Leg ..read more

In January 2024, for the first time, a National Football League (“NFL”) playoff game was broadcast exclusively on a streaming service. Much to the disdain of fans, the game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins during the NFL’s “Super Wildcard Weekend” was only available with a paid subscription to NBC’s Peacock. Despite public outrage, however, over 11 million people watched the game, and Peacock experienced record growth in subscriber numbers leading up to the contest. By broadcasting the game exclusively on Peacock, the League demonstrated thei ..read more

Generative AI certainly challenges our traditional notions of intellectual property rights, especially within copyright law. Novel AI tools such as Midjourney and Chat GPT raise new questions about whether works created with artificially intelligent machines can be copyrighted. While the U.S. Copyright Office announced that works created by AI without human intervention or involvement still cannot be copyrighted, there remains ample grey area. One such area concerns the output of algorithms. While algorithms are central to machine learning and artificial intelligence, their und ..read more

The New York Times (“NYT”) recently filed complaints against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging copyright infringements in their use of the Times’ copyrighted materials to train ChatGPT.  First, NYT alleged that the defendants engaged in copying substantial NYT content when building their Large Language Models. OpenAI incorporates internal corpus such as WebText, WebText 2, and external sources like Common Crawl to train the AI. These sources are often deemed a “copy of the Internet.” Defendants are accused of such “copying” without permission or payment. OpenAI asserts t ..read more

In the polarized political climate of the United States one can feel hard-pressed to find a topic that all sides can champion. The Senate’s hearing this past week, where they grilled five of the biggest names in social media regarding kids’ online safety, seemed to do just that. Representatives from Meta, TikTok, Discord, X, and Snapchat were all present, with Meta and TikTok taking the brunt of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ire for their products’ impact on children. Notably, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta apologized to the families who had been harmed by social media, and Senator Lind ..read more