Buyer Beware

[Editor's Note: Welcome to the "5-Minute Update," an occasional podcast on topics of interest in intellectual property licensing. It is the latest addition to a burgeoning media empire that includes "Failure - the Podcast" and "Innovation Blab". Hah! A word of warning: episodes of the "5-Minute Update" are rarely that brief.]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is new to most of us, though it has been in development since the 1950s and the key to self-driving cars on the roads in the 1980s and popularized in the 2010s. Still, most of us only became aware of AI’s power with the release of ChatGPT, in late 2022. That’s when AI’s benefits and risks became a regular topic at the water cooler, apart from occasional discussion of a crashed Tesla.

Governments took note of AI somewhat earlier, with self-driving car legislation emerging from the states in the 2010s and from the federal government late in that period. Legislation has been slower in the making when it comes to AI writ large, with the first laws not emerging until nearly the 2020s.

Whether for autonomous vehicles or the broader category of AI-based consumer products that are beginning to hit the markets, government regulation may be too little and too late. Can the private sector do better — and, if so, could technology and data licensing agreements provide a viable mechanism for regulating AI in consumer products?

Join a panel discussion on the ethics of AI and how it might inform drafting those agreements as this new technology takes hold in the marketplace. The particular focus is on the fairness of those agreements, when the value of consumer data collected by AI apps is taken into account — as it rarely is.

Our guests are Nicholas Mattei, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tulane University School of Science & Engineering; Rob Lalka, Professor of Practice in Management and the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business, Tulane University, A. B. Freeman School of Business and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation; and, Eric Gottschling, Global Director - Licensing Commercialization, Borg Warner.

This episode's discussion was a run-up to a live talk at the annual meeting of the Licensing Executive Society (USA/Canada) in October 2024.