Moot Court Cases

A Moot Court is an  event in which law students present briefs and oral arguments on both sides of hypothetical cases.  The cases are decided before a jury of students.      

The object of a moot court is to provide experience for students in legal research, in writing briefs and in presenting legal arguments. 

Moot court cases are entirely imaginary, and no one should mistake these made-up examples for real legal actions, even though they usually involve  precedents from real cases.   Also see these links  (Research for moot court) and (Writing a brief).   

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Media law MOOT COURT 

Cases  spring 2026
HH 5402 courtroom 

#1. Aurelius Press v. SynthMind AI, Inc. (Copyright and AI)
April 21 

Aurelius Press (“Aurelius”) is a mid-sized U.S. publishing company specializing in contemporary fiction and nonfiction. It owns registered copyrights to more than 3,000 books, including several award-winning novels still actively sold in print, ebook, and audiobook formats.

SynthMind AI, Inc. (“SynthMind”) is a technology startup that develops a large language model called SCRIBE, marketed as an AI writing assistant capable of generating original prose, summaries, and stylistic emulations upon user request.

Between 2019 and 2026, SynthMind trained SCRIBE on a massive dataset consisting of web-scraped digital books and articles, including full-text copies of many copyrighted works owned by Aurelius. SynthMind did not obtain licenses from Aurelius for the use of its copyrighted books. However,  SynthMind claims that 1) The training process involved converting texts into numerical representations (tokens and weights), and 2) The model does not store or reproduce verbatim copies of copyrighted works.

In 2025, Aurelius publishers discovered that when prompted, SCRIBE could: 1 Produce passages closely resembling the narrative voice, plot structure, and character archetypes of Aurelius’s bestselling novel The Plexiglass Orchard. It could also generate text that, in some cases, contained short phrases identical or nearly identical to the original novel.

Aurelius  filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging Copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 106)

SynthMind moved to dismiss, arguing that: Training an AI model on copyrighted works is fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107;  SCRIBE’s outputs are transformative and non-infringing;  Any similarity is the result of user misuse, not SynthMind’s conduct.

The legal question at the heart of the case is the doctrine of transformative value from the Campbell v Acuff-Rose case.  A good overview of Campbell in light of the AI copyright fight is here (Nexis login required):

Patrick K. Lin (2024). ARTICLE: RETROFITTING FAIR USE: ART & GENERATIVE AI AFTER WARHOL. Santa Clara Law Review, 64, 467.

 #2. Baggins v AI-Inc. et al (Right of private people to be forgotten; AI and defamation; transparency of generative AI algorithms)
April 23   

A private person says his reputation is being  damaged by false AI – generated information.  Fifteen years ago, Reid B. Baggins was mistakenly arrested for burglary, but was acquitted and all charges were dropped. The court also ordered that his arrest information be expunged from the record. However, the web and news sites that carried information about the arrest flatly refused to remove the information, saying that it was truthful at the time and that AI-Inc’s freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment.  

The original inaccuracy has been compounded in the past two years by the fact that generative AI-Inc has put Baggins on a black list of  “dangerous people with criminal charges” that employment agencies use to screen candidates. Now, whenever he applies for a job, Mr. Baggins has to explain that he  was never convicted of burglary and that the charges were “hallucinated” by an AI application.   

Baggins is asking the court to enforce existing privacy law against AI-Inc., esp. the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). He also maintains that he should have a “right to be forgotten,” which exists under European GDPR laws. Further,   Baggins is also demanding full transparency and reverse engineering of AI-generating “black box” programming in his and other cases so that invasions of privacy do not continue to take place.   

AI-Inc is pushing back,  insisting that it is not technically possible to reverse engineer its AI  Large Language Model, and that it has a First Amendment right to comment on public issues (such as criminal charges in the Baggins case). In any event, minor inaccuracies are supposed to be tolerated under the NY Times v Sullivan standard, AI-Inc lawyers say.   AI-created works (even political deepfakes) should receive First Amendment protection, AI-Inc says.

 (Background: See this  study by Eumi K. Lee in Rutgers Law Review and this article in   The Conversation.   Also see Ashutosh Bhagwat (June, 2021) The Law of Facebook. UC Davis Law Review, 54, 2353.  KATHRYN BINDER  (June 5, 2025). NOTE: Artificial Intelligence & Defamation Law: An Excuse to Do Away with the Infamously Controversial Section 230?. Hastings Law Journal, 76, 1539. ) 

#3 FenceDown v California  (Prior restraint, fighting words, privacy)
April 23 

   “FenceDown” is selling a mobile phone app that reads the cell phone numbers on a local network and then allows its client to text a  message to all of them.  The app can also identify users with an infrared locator so a client  can point their phone at strangers and send a message. even if they don’t know their phone numbers.

“FenceDown” technology does not reveal or retain the phone numbers, so the company says it is not an invasion of privacy. Instead, it is a First Amendment-protected activity in a public space similar to taking a video or shouting out loud.

The problem, according to an injunction filed by Sacramento district attorney Chris D Miller, is that the technology enables fighting words, and that highly disparaging text messages are being sent live to groups in bars, in traffic, and in church and government meetings. The messages are  leading to fistfights and road rage incidents. Miller says this means that the technology itself should be banned under the Brandenburg v Ohio standard for imminent action and the Chaplinsky v New Hampshire  standard for “fighting words.” 

In one recent incident, people attending  a city council meeting all received an anonymous text message saying: “Everyone in this room is an idiot, especially you.”  The council meeting had to be adjourned after a shouting match broke out.  In another incident, politicians at a campaign debate were all told that they “had been discovered” and should “get out of town immediately.”  Some did.  FenceDown says this technology itself should not be made illegal since it is useful in a variety of legal ways.  In any event, typical messages are not calls to violent action but simply the sort of  “unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials” that are protected under the Sullivan standard.  

California is suing FenceDown to make the injunction permanent.

An interesting article that addresses this issue is by Jacob Sullum (2026, March 14)  The Enduring Fight Over ‘Fighting Words’. Reason (Magazine). 

 #5 Havisham  v  US Copyright Office   (Can an AI-generated work be copyrighted?)      April 21  

In 2023, the US Copyright Office denied US artist Ankit Sahni’s application to copyright an image generated by prompts and processed through “RAGHAV Artificial Intelligence Painting App.” This AI app  combined  a sunset and the famous Van Gogh “Starry Night” painting. “If content is entirely generated by AI, it cannot be protected by copyright” because copyright protection is limited to works of human authorship.  

A similar question now emerges with the Havisham painting created through a similar AI app.   The question is what the US Constitution requires of authors and inventors who apply for copyright protection and how much human input is required for copyright status.   See AI and Copyright on this site for background.   

#6  Anderson v NerdLens AI  (Is anonymous non-consensual recording a misappropriation of NIL?)  April 23 

In 2024, tech company NerdLens AI, Inc. launched an augmented reality (AR) app that continuously records audio and video through smart glasses, identifies  individuals using facial recognition, and generates “memory prompts” for users. The AI model powering the app was trained on massive datasets scraped from public websites, social media, and leaked datasets.

Sarah Anderson, a journalist, discovers that she was recorded multiple times by strangers using NerdLens glasses without her consent, that she was identified by name and profession using facial recognition; that the system generated summaries of her private conversations, and that some of this data was later used to train NerdLens’s AI models.

Anderson is alleging that a data breach exposed portions of NerdLens’ stored training recordings of herm, in violation of her privacy rights, biometric privacy laws (modeled on laws like Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act) and NIL misappropriation laws.

Concerns about Meta AI glasses in 2025 – 26 seem as serious as with  Google Glass in 2014, as noted in:

We will not be hearing these cases:  

# 4 Assn Free Digital Media v Bondi (Cert to Moot Court denied)  

#7 National Greek Life v Redford  (Cert to Moot Court denied)