With the explosion of media, communications, and advertising channels and techniques, including e-commerce conduits and businesses, and the resources they offer employees and users, it is evermore difficult to figure out the difference between 'commercial' and 'non-commercial' speech. But finding the answer is extremely important, because it usually determines whether one is liable for consumer fraud and false advertising, and for right-of-publicity claims.
Barry M. BenjaminImagine the following two scenarios, and try to figure out what the real difference is.
First, your competitor blatantly lies in its advertising about the effectiveness of its products; second, your competitor blatantly lies to a reporter about the effectiveness of its products, and the reporter publishes the lies in a newspaper article or in a magazine.
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The volume and sophistication of work hitting law firm marketing departments is accelerating. That moves the burden from responding to being ready: ready with differentiated positioning, ready with competitive intelligence, ready to get a compelling pitch to the right client before a formal process even begins. That requires more sophisticated output, produced faster, by teams that are already stretched past capacity.
In categories where products are difficult to differentiate on performance, and that describes most of the AI industry today, customers do not choose on features, they choose on trust. Brand integrity, in those markets, is a material business asset.
The annals of copyright decisions could provide a reasonably representative catalog of what our culture has been up to over the past 200 years. A Feb. 3 decision from the Southern District of New York is a case in point. It involves a sex-trafficking conspiracy, Tweets attacking a troubled crypto firm, and a claimed transfer of copyright ownership through a restitution order in a criminal case, all over an undercurrent of competing First Amendment and victim-privacy concerns.
Matthew McConaughey secured eight federal trademark registrations covering his voice and iconic catchphrases in a novel legal strategy aimed at combating AI’s unauthorized use of his voice and likeness. The move signals an important evolution in the power dynamics between talent/brands and the companies providing generative AI tools.
The use of AI does not alter fundamental obligations of accuracy, reasonableness and accountability. The legal risk lies not in the existence of hallucinations but in the failure to govern and verify them.
