Who Owns the Output? AI Copyright & IP Explained w/ Chris Paniewski | Startup Legal Basics

Alright, everybody. Welcome back to start up basics. Why did I do this series? Because I get asked the same questions over and over again, and I like to help founders navigate complex issues, even the simple ones. Today, we're gonna talk about complex and a moving target with Chris Panjewski, partner at Wilson Sonsini. You know, we talked, Chris, in my first, discussion with you about input and training data. Great. If you guys want to see that, go to thisweekinstartups.com/spacy. Part two, output. You know, and I brought up the very evocative issue of Star Wars content. One thing you might want to do using a large language model out there is say, hey, make me into a Jedi Knight. Now, is that legal or not? It turns out a lot of the LLMs have said, when you try to take IP from the Disney corporation, which is one of the preeminent rights holders in the world, who is also one of the preeminent defenders of their rights. Some of the LLMs now, Chris, I don't know if you noticed, will not let you do that. Right. They are protecting themselves. Right? They don't want to show that they can generate infringing content, and they are looking to be able to frankly bolster their own fair use argument, which we talked about in the prior podcast. And if they put these kinds of guardrails in place, those are some of the best practices to try to protect the LLMs from lawsuits from third parties that they're not doing enough to protect copyrighted content. And a key part of fair use and a key part of copyright law is, hey, if I made Star Wars, I'm George Lucas, 1977. And we're sitting here now, you know, fifty years later, you know, trying to mitigate how does Star Wars work in the age of AI. It turns out well, we had an analogy to this. DVDs came out at a certain point. VOD, video on demand came out. Merchandising came out. All kinds of new technologies came out and different opportunities for George Lucas to, you know, generate revenue from his IP. And it turns out the language models are no different. AI will be no different. Just because it's a new technology does not mean you get the right to take George Lucas's or now the Disney corporation's opportunity. Correct, Chris? Absolutely. And just building on top of that, if George Lucas had used AI to create the characters to create what a Jedi looks like, it's questionable whether he'd be able to protect it. And I think that's a lot of the things that we're facing now is when clients are using AI and they're using it to create code, to create other IP they want to protect, does that deprive them of the ability to actually enforce their rights in it against others? Oh my god. I didn't even think about that. So if I said make …