AI, online platform regulation and loot boxes: Legal trends to watch in 2024

Legal One year ago, we made some predictions on legal trends for 2023. Now it is time to look back and see where we have been right (+) and where we have been wrong (-), as well as making some new predictions for 2024. We’ve got more than a dozen topics to look at, so let’s dive in… Artificial intelligence and copyright Online platform regulation Metaverse NFTs Terms of Use / EULAs Loot Boxes Unfinished products, product description, onscreen texts, and right of withdrawal Free-to-play and paying with data Clones and other IP disputes Market dominance and platforms Youth protection beyond blood and violence Data protection (+) Esports What we did not foresee New Trends 1. Artificial intelligence and copyright What we predicted (+) The increasing improvement of artificial intelligence will be a hot topic in legal discussions. One of the major legal subjects will be copyright law. For example, an eleven-year-old has used the AI ChatGPT to create a text adventure in the world of Harry Potter. The art-software DALL-E allows the user to create digital images from natural language descriptions while feeding its algorithm with public datasets. This will have a particular impact on the design of video game assets in the future, and will raise questions such as who is the owner of AI-generated content and how artists can protect their artworks from being utilized by artificial intelligence. What happened Tick. If anything, the topic was even bigger. AI is already broadly used by game companies for creating IP assets, or at least inspires artists in games companies, especially when it comes to find ready-to-sort stories and screenplays, background and character designs. Accordingly, we haveseen a lot of video games companies (big or small) struggling to establish AI use policies internally in an attempt to limit the risk for unsolicited and uncontrolled landslide use of AI. We saw some first lawsuits on the protectability of AI output in the US and the UK. The essence so far is that the output of AI is not generated by human beings and therefore does not qualify for copyright protection. On the other hand, the arrangement of various works created by AI may qualify for copyright protection. AI can also be used as a tool for digging into and scraping onto existing and available works, databases, texts and image sets for generating potentially infringing output. A new court case brought by the New York Times in the US against OpenAI and Microsoft over the alleged infringing use of materials scraped from the newspapers by their AI-based tools has just hit the news. And it sounds like it won’t be the last. Some data protection authorities (in Italy and Germany, for example) also entered the scene. Italy’s data protection authority was the first, in March 2023, to force Open AI to temporarily suspend its services in Italy due to the lack of proper notices under the GDPR and, primarily, the lack of information on the algorithmic processing of user data (also as
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