Writes about Copyright and AI, mostly
An open letter to my colleagues at Emory Law Dear colleagues, Generative AI has made every form of assessment other than a supervised exam (written or oral) essentially worthless as a measure of what a student knows. I will expand on that below, but it’s hard to see how it can seriously be a matter Continue reading "AI, Accommodations, and Assessment Integrity"
Training Lawyers for a New Era Starting in academic year 2026–27, Emory Law will offer a formal concentration in Artificial Intelligence and the Law — a structured academic pathway for J.D. students who want to develop real expertise in one of the most consequential areas of modern legal practice. See this announcement for an overview. Continue reading "Emory Law s New AI Law Concentration"
The 5th Annual Legal Scholars Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence at Emory University School of Law starts at Emory Law tomorrow. The Roundtable features a phenomenal lineup of authors, commentators and participants, including: Katrina Geddes, Andres Sawicki, Gabriel Weil, Jonathan Iwry, Nathan Reitinger, Bryan Choi, Jacob Noti-Victor, Annemarie Bridy, Charlotte Tschider, Michael Froomkin, David…
David Kemp has just released a policy builder designed to help people who are struggling to design an AI policy that is relevant to their specific course. According to the website, the policy content is grounded in Sag, AI Policies for Law Schools (2025); Bliss, Teaching Law in the Age of Generative AI (2024); Perkins, Continue reading "David Kemp s AI Policy Builder for Legal Education"
This post is a very lightly edited extract from my forthcoming article in the Duke Law Journal, Copyright s Jagged Frontier (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6319379) What does AI memorization prove? Some argue that any evidence of memorization necessarily negates the claim that AI models are transformative. They advance this claim by injecting the term “compression” into the…
Why the Line Between Legal and Infringing AI Won’t Be a Line at All By Matthew James Sag Everyone wants to know whether training AI on copyrighted works is legal. The real answer is: it depends—and the boundary between what’s permissible and what isn’t will be far messier than anyone expects. In my forthcoming article Continue reading "Copyright’s Jagged Frontier"
Roundtable Emory Law is proud to host the fifth annual Legal Scholars Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence. The Roundtable will take place on April 09-10, 2026, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The Legal Scholars Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is designed to be a forum for the discussion of current legal scholarship on AI, covering Continue reading "Legal Scholars Roundtable…
The other shoe has finally dropped. Today, December 11, 2025, OpenAI and Disney announced a partnership that essentially signals a marriage between generative AI and legacy media. Although some kind of deal was inevitable, the range and scope of this one are striking. Disney is sinking $1 billion into OpenAI for an equity stake and Continue reading "The Mouse and the Model: the Disney-OpenAI Deal"
Why content licensing cannot solve AI s training-data problem I have just published an article as part of the ProMarket symposium for the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, The False Hope of Content Licensing at Internet Scale Although the article is not very long, I thought I would summarize my point even more Continue reading "A handful of cherries does not make a sundae"
Judge Stein s Order Denying OpenAI s Motion to Dismiss in Authors Guild v. OpenAI, Inc., No. 25-md-3143 (SHS) (OTW) (S.D.N.Y. Oct. 27, 2025) A new ruling in Authors Guild v. OpenAI has major implications for copyright law, well beyond artificial intelligence. On October 27, 2025, Judge Sidney Stein of the Southern District of New York denied Continue reading "Copyright Winter is Coming (to…