We've got two representative plaintiffs that purport to essentially represent a group of similarly situated people. And in this case, they talk about potentially hundreds, if not thousands of similarly situated actors. The first question I have is, is to what extent do these two actors, pursuant to their SAG agreement, have the right to sue um, in light of the claims?

In other words, they're members of a union. They are represented by that union, and typically the union steps in for them to advocate their professional position. This is a claim that, that, as I read it, gives, would at least give rise to the question, do these two individuals, by virtue of being SAG Actor members, do they have a right to sue in their individual capacity?

In today's court filing. We look at two actors, two voice actors. Who have sued Lovo for misappropriation and misuse of their voices. It's fascinating in that the actors actually didn't know it had happened until they heard themselves on a podcast.

From Shannon Lietz: For companies that are starting to adopt things like AI, and Copilot, and ChatGPT, and LLAMA, and you name whatever LLM that's out there, Are they evaluating their policies with relationship to how data gets used ? My perspective is, if you're going to bring in public data, or you're going to bring in copyrighted materials, note that because it could be a concern. It could end up in something that does get flagged for future lawsuits.

From Mark Miller: In today’s episode, Joel, Shannon and I discuss a case where an employee at AWS blew the whistle, saying the company is ignoring its own policies when it comes to consumption of data for its AI engine. Is being told to ignore company policy illegal? You might be surprised on how our trio comes to grips with the concept.

From Joel MacMull: The French competition authority last week said the tech giant, Google, failed to negotiate fair licensing deals with media outlets and did not tell them it was using their articles to train its chatbot. And as a consequence, it fined Google about 270 million US dollars. The fine was in Euros, but that's roughly what we're dealing with in terms of a conversion rate.

So it's not nothing, but also for one of the largest tech companies in the world, it's, it's, you know, certainly not going to make a material difference to their bottom line. But it outlines, I think, some interesting issues, particularly when we contrast that to what's going on now in the United States and some of the litigation we're seeing against OpenAI.

From Mark Miller:  The real issue here that I read in the French decision is that, I'll put it in American terms, Google is not negotiating in good faith.

The part of the negotiations are who do you negotiate with and who pays who when things are settled. And I think that's Google's case that they're coming back with to say, you haven't defined the rules of the game or else they keep switching, so we don't even know who we're dealing with anymore.