Mr. Rogers at Agincourt: AI’s Most Wholesome War and What It Teaches Us About the Future of Learning
By Brent C. J. Britton
Hi neighbor.
Somewhere between Saving Private Ryan and It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the internet decided to drop Mr. Rogers, yes, the sweatered saint of neighborly kindness and empathy, straight into the Battle of Agincourt.
No armor. No sword. Just cardigans, compassion, and an English longbow volley overhead.
Welcome to the brave new world of AI-generated video, where Mr. Rogers can step into a medieval battle just as easily as a deepfake Neil deGrasse Tyson can claim the world is flat and your imagination is the only content budget that matters, because creating…
18 Lawyers, a Chatbot, and the Ethics of Blame: What the AI Hallucination Epidemic Really Teaches Us
By Brent C. J. Britton
Earlier this month, a California appeals court slapped a lawyer with a $10,000 fine for filing a brief full of hallucinated case law, citations straight out of ChatGPT’s fever dream. The court published its opinion as a warning shot to every lawyer in the state: if you use AI and it lies, the consequences are still yours.
Honestly, it’s hard to argue with that. But it’s also hard not to laugh, and then sigh, at the sheer creativity of the excuses rolling out of courtrooms nationwide.
404 Media recently did a forensic dive into hundreds…
You know all that nifty art you're creating with your fancy new generative AI tools like DALL-E?
Turns out, AI-generated art gives rise to rather a legal double-whammy, to wit: 1. you probably don't own it; and 2. you can probably still get sued for it.
As to ownership, in the U.S., only humans can be legal authors. Works prepared by non-humans are not copyrightable and, therefore, not legally ownable. All the nifty shots your generative AI tools are so artfully rendering are probably in the public domain, so if you share them, anyone may be able to copy…
My team and I, we are crypto lawyers much of the time. We work in many other areas of technology law, but we spend a lot of time working on cryptocurrency projects. We know as much about blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and the like as any other crypto lawyers in the world (of whom there are currently precious few). We have been practicing law since long before the blockchain existed. Also, some if us, myself in particular, are former software engineers. So we can read your code. We get the joke.
We understand the compulsion to move fast with blockchain technology…
In a talk that was as engaging as it was enlightening, Brent Britton broke down the crucial role intellectual property (IP) plays in today’s innovation-driven world. Whether you’re a startup founder, investor, or creative professional, understanding IP is essential for protecting your work, staying competitive, and growing your business.
The Importance of IP in Business and Innovation
Britton opened by defining intellectual property as the legal rights that protect intangible assets—like inventions, creative works, brand names, and trade secrets. These are divided into four main types: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.
He explained that IP is not…
Present and Happy to be here
Can there be anyone more present and happy to be here than Stephen Hawking in zero g?
And can there be any greater poetry than Stephen Hawking slipping the surly bonds of gravity, when Hawking himself for 20 years held the same professorship once held by none other than Sir Isaac Newton, the first of our kind to formulate a meaningful theory of how gravity works?
Poverty and Murder
I take attendance at the top of my creativity class at USF each week, and when I call each student’s name I make them respond with an enthusiastic “Present…
You cannot use a brand in commerce if your use would be confusingly similar to someone else’s brand. So, do not name your company or your product or service without clearing trademark rights first. Once you choose your name, scour the internet using the search engine of your choice to ensure no one else is using it as the brand name of similar goods or services. Also check the TESS trademark database at uspto.gov to see if your name turns up. Remember that trademarks are compared on the basis of their overall visual and phonetic impression, so clever spelling inconsistencies…
I meet with a lot of folks who have come up with a nifty idea for a product, but who, for various reasons, don't want to be entrepreneurs. Instead, they want to sell their idea to a big company.
If you have an idea for a product that you’re going to promote or peddle to big companies, bear in mind that, absent your taking some kind of protective action in advance, there is absolutely nothing that will stop them from taking and implementing your idea all for themselves. I would call this stealing, but it is not. No one owns ideas.…
When courting potential investors with an executive summary, or even just an email, see if you can deploy a seriously captivating hook right off the bat. I know this is easier said than done. But remember, your executive summary is nothing more than a 30-second blipvert to get the reader interested in taking a meeting and learning actual stuff about your company. It's an advertisement. The point is just to hook them.
Your executive summary will be scanned by investors with all the conscientiousness of an HR manager reading a resume. You’ll have about 5-10 seconds to catch their attention. Which…
As your corporate and IP lawyer, I would like to thank you for the situations into which you get yourself, extraction from which requires the payment of substantial sums of cash to me. Far more cash, it must be said, than you would have paid me had you brought the situation to me in the first place.
Anyway, here's how to put my kids through college.
5. Promise employees and other people lots of stock, but don't paper anything with actual contracts. Come to your lawyer a year or more later asking for "corporate cleanup." This will take weeks, not days. Oooo...…