On The Merits Bloomberg Industry Group

On the Merits is on hiatus for a bit while we create some great new episodes for you. Until then, we're pleased to offer a special presentation of our ABA Silver Gavel award-winning series, UnCommon Law.

Generative AI tools are already promising to change the world. Systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT can answer complex questions, write poems and code, and even mimic famous authors with uncanny accuracy. But in using copyrighted materials to train these powerful AI products, are AI companies infringing the rights of untold creators?
This season on UnCommon Law, we'll explore the intersection between artificial intelligence and the law. Episode one examines how large language models actually ingest and learn from billions of online data points, including copyrighted works. And we explore the lawsuits filed by creators who claim their copyrights were exploited without permission to feed the data-hungry algorithms powering tools like ChatGPT.
If you like this episode and want to hear part 2, visit news.bloomberglaw.com/podcasts, or search for UnCommon Law in your podcast app.

Guests:

Matthew Butterick, founder at Butterick Law, and co-counsel with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on class-action lawsuits against OpenAI and others

Isaiah Poritz, technology reporter for Bloomberg Law

James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell Tech and Cornell Law School

When California's new mental health courts were getting started, the debate centered on whether they had too much power–or too little.
Now, roughly six months in, the state is discovering a new flaw: too few people are using them.
On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Bloomberg Law reporter Maia Spoto talks about why California's Community Assistance, Recovery, and Empowerment, or CARE, Courts, have had such an underwhelming start. Also, what this means for the state's governor, Gavin Newsom (D), who invested a large amount of political capital into them. We also hear from one of the judges helping to set up a CARE Court in Orange County, who talks about the large amount of manpower needed to adjudicate these special types of cases.
Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Marijuana is now legal in about half of the states, but still maintains its illegal status at the federal level. What does this mean for an employer who wants to, or has to, administer drug tests for its employees?
We tackle that question on our podcast, On The Merits, with Sean Mack, a partner and co-chair of the cannabis and hemp law practice at the New Jersey firm Pashman Stein. Mack says testing employees for marijuana–or even firing them for testing positive–is now so fraught with employment law issues that it may no longer be worth the hassle.
Mack also talks about a case out of Ohio, Fisher v. Airgas, in which an employee who was fired for a false positive marijuana test result won at the federal appellate level. Mack says it's a sign that, in employment law cases, even federal judges are able to look beyond pot's controlled substance status.
Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Hetal Doshi, the top antitrust litigator at the Department of Justice, says she tries to make the cases her team pursues easy for the average person to understand.
"If we are litigating cases inside an echo chamber, or like in a very narrow, technocratic way that only other lawyers can understand, then we're failing to do our jobs," Doshi says on this episode of our podcast, On The Merits.
Doshi spoke to reporters Leah Nylen and Danielle Kaye about how this philosophy played into recent cases that blocked mergers in the airline and publishing industries. Doshi also talks about the idea that antitrust laws are meant to protect not only consumers from higher prices, but also to protect workers from lower wages.
Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

The Commerce Department's disastrous rollout of a new payment system left some National Weather Service employees on the hook for their own business expenses, and even led utility companies to shut off power to some critical weather systems due to unpaid bills.
Bloomberg Government reporter Jack Fitzpatrick found that even now, months after this system went online, the Department is still working through a backlog of unpaid invoices. And despite a report from its Inspector General, it's still not clear what exactly went wrong and who at the Department is to blame.
On this episode of our podcast, On The Merits, Fitzpatrick explains what happens when a federal agency can't pay its bills on time and what might happen when the Department expands this troubled payment system in the years to come.
Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.

Harvard, NYU, and several other elite universities have been hit with civil rights lawsuits from students who say the schools allow, or at least don't counter, campus antisemitism.
Though these suits largely stem from an increase in antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, attorneys say the groundwork for them was laid with an executive order back in 2019. That's when the Trump administration adopted a broad definition of antisemitism for civil rights claims under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
On today's episode of On The Merits, Bloomberg News reporter David Voreacos talks about the litigation and why the policy change could pose challenges for the universities facing the suits. We also hear from attorneys representing Jewish students in two of the suits. They explain why they believe universities should be held accountable for the actions of their students and faculty.
Do you have feedback on this episode of On The Merits? Give us a call and leave a voicemail at 703-341-3690.