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).
Media law MOOT COURT
HH 5402 courtroom
Dec 1 and 3
1 Baggins v AI-Inc. et al (Right of private people to be forgotten; AI and defamation; transparency of generative AI algorithms; AI and false arrest)
A private person says he was arrested and his reputation damaged by false AI – generated information. Reid B. Baggins of Redford Va was arrested after a facial recognition security camera system alerted police that Baggins was a possible match for another individual who was wanted for burglary.
Baggins showed police his drivers license showing that he was not the other individual wanted for burglary, and police added the charge of false identification. Baggins was eventually released and is now suing AI-Inc along with city police.
AI-Inc is pushing back, insisting that the facial recognition system is protected by the 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: Killinger v Jagger; also 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. )
2 FenceDown v California (Prior restraint, fighting words, privacy)
“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).
3 Anderson v NerdLens AI (Is anonymous non-consensual recording a misappropriation of NIL?)
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:
- Bridget A. Sarpu * (2014) GOOGLE: THE ENDEMIC THREAT TO PRIVACY. Journal of High Technology Law, 15, 97;
- Zahra Takhshid (2024), WEARABLE AI, BYSTANDER NOTICE, AND THE QUESTION OF PRIVACY FRICTIONS. Boston University Law Review, 104, 1087;
- Brittan Heller (2024). BALANCING REALITIES: NAVIGATING THE BENEFITS, RISKS, AND POLICY LANDSCAPE OF EXTENDED REALITY. Drexel Law Review, 17, 91. .
- Katz v US (1967) gives a two-part test for a “reasonable expectation of privacy.”
4 National Greek Life v City of Redford (content-specific signage and time, place, and manner restrictions).
The City of Redford passed and enforces ordinances prohibiting the display of “Greek” letters, banners, signs, except under the following time, place, and manner conditions such as Homecoming, Rush, and Greek Week. (Ord. No. 1553, 5-14-07).
National Greek Life argues that this is a content-based regulation of Constitutionally protected speech and must pass a strict scrutiny test. The City of Redford argues that it is a routine time, place, and manner restriction and subject only to a “rational basis” test.
See City of Austin v Reagan National Advertising (2021) and Reed v Town of Gilbert (2015). Also “Content Neutral sign codes after Reed and Austin,” National Sign Foundation.
5 Aurelius Press v. SynthMind AI, Inc. (Copyright and AI)
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.
6 Havisham v US Copyright Office (Can an AI-generated work be copyrighted?)
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.