Professor Shubha Ghosh Discusses U.S. District Court Judge William H. Alsup’s Willingness to Learn About AI Technology Before Hearing AI and Copyrights Case

Crandall Melvin Professor of Law Shubha Ghosh spoke with Bloomberg Tax for the article “In the Battle of AI and Copyrights, a Judge Seeks a Tech Lesson”. U.S. District Court Judge William H. Alsup will be hearing Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, a case to determine whether Anthropic PBC violated copyright law by training its AI chatbot Claude on copyrighted books without the authors’ permission. Judge Alsup requested the parties provide him with an overview of how generative AI works.

Ghosh, director of the Syracuse Intellectual Property Law Institute, says “Ultimately, judges need to understand the underlying facts. The opposite extreme is: ‘I don’t really care what the world is like, here is the law.’”