Timothy E. Murphy

Amici curiae are scholars of intellectual property. Amici have no personal interest in the outcome of this litigation but share a professional interest in seeing trade secrecy and takings laws applied in a manner that is doctrinally coherent; promotes innovation and competition; and protects consumers, public safety, and public health. Amici believe that Appellant xAI has fundamentally misinterpreted the Supreme Court’s and this Court’s precedents on the intersection of trade secrecy and takings law. Endorsement of xAI’s view of the law would flout precedent and imperil state and federal transparency and regulatory law. Amici present this brief to assist the Court in its analysis of xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction enjoining California Assembly Bill 2013 (“A.B.2013” or “the Act”) on the alleged basis that the Act violates the Takings Clause. Amici express no view on other claims raised by xAI. The district court properly denied a preliminary injunction against California Assembly Bill 2013 (“A.B.2013” or “the Act”) based on xAI’s claim that the Act violates the Takings Clause. As the district court correctly reasoned, xAI has not adequately alleged—and probably can never prove—that information affected by the Act constitute trade secrets under California law. On this basis alone, the district court’s treatment of xAI’s takings claim deserves affirmance. Our brief provides an additional basis to affirm the district court’s denial of a preliminary injunction on the basis of xAI’s takings claim. Even if summaries of generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) training data were valid trade secrets, this Court should still affirm the district court’s dismissal of xAI’s request for a preliminary injunction based on the Takings Clause. xAI’s takings claim must fail because xAI cannot establish that it and other developers of generative AI were ever given a promise by the State of California that their training data would remain perpetually secret and immune from regulation or public disclosure. Absent such a promise of secrecy, no takings claims arising from governmental interference with a trade secret can succeed.

Current discussions on the subject of artificial intelligence inventorship or authorship are focused in the patent and copyright spaces. These discussions largely ignore the trade secrets space outside of the context of other’s ownership of AI-related technology. This is likely due to the disconnect between creatorship and ownership that exists in trade secrets law but that is not present in patent and copyright law. In particular, there is no requirement of human creatorship in trade secrets law, but patents and copyright might require a human creator. This article explores the possibility of AI ownership of AI-generated information under current trade secrets law for modern AI systems. The article concludes that modern AI systems could possibly meet the statutory requirements for trade secrets ownership because the limiting factors are technological, not legal. Accordingly, theoretical justifications for providing trade secrets rights to AI systems are also explored. The traditional justification for IP rights do not provide sufficient justification for trade secrets rights in modern AI systems, but could provide justifications for later advanced systems commensurate with other IP regimes.

Partially due to the widespread use of employee confidentiality and invention assignment agreements, employers routinely take ownership of employee creative outputs and use trade secrets law to enforce those rights post-employment. This Article proposes that, with respect to employee creative outputs, the current status of trade secrets law is inconsistent with the modern workplace, including as significantly altered, maybe permanently, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the goal of this Article is to establish a mode of recognizing employee rights in their own creative outputs through a modification to the existing general skills and knowledge exclusion to explicitly recognize an employee’s own creative outputs as subject to the exclusion. The proposal, if adopted, would provide employees with increased autonomy over their own creative outputs and greater ability to chart their own careers in their chosen field without fear of trade secrets misappropriation claims from former employers.

Mentoring Graduate Students In Engineering Education Through Team Teaching Jamie Phillips and Timothy Murphy The University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 Abstract The preparation of science and engineering graduate students for careers in academia is of concern due to the lack of formal professional training in teaching required for new science and engineering faculty members. In this paper, a team teaching project resembling a teaching internship is described. An undergraduate electrical engineering course was team taught by a faculty member and graduate student in the goal of preparing the graduate student for a future career in academia. The structure and outcomes of the project are presented as a potential vehicle to expand opportunities for mentoring graduate students in engineering education. Introduction Graduate students in science and engineering pursuing doctoral degrees typically have minimal focus on teaching, despite a potential career path in academics. The primary mechanism for graduate students to learn about engineering education is through an appointment as a teaching assistant or graduate student instructor. At many institutions, formal programs are in place to develop teaching skills in graduate students for their role as instructors. However, the duration or scope of teaching assistant assignments are often limited, where students are typically not exposed to key aspects of teaching a course. Graduate students are typically not included in fundamental aspects of teaching such as the development of educational objectives, course planning, addressing learning styles of students, and examination of course material. Formal courses in teaching science and engineering have been introduced at some institutions including Purdue University1 and The University Of Michigan (Engineering 580 - Teaching Engineering, introduced by Susan Montgomery), where fundamental aspects of teaching are addressed explicitly. Unfortunately, there are very few opportunities provided for graduates students to apply knowledge and skills related to teaching prior to obtaining an academic faculty position. Given this shortcoming, teaching internships for graduate students have been envisioned to provide opportunities for graduate students interested in future careers in teaching. J. Burke has gone as far as to suggest that teaching internships should be required for all doctoral students2, perhaps modeled after the clinical internship for medical fields. The Georgia Institute of Technology has been a pioneer in this area, where teaching internships in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering have been offered since 19903. In the teaching internship, the graduate student team-teaches one-third to two-thirds of a quarter-long undergraduate course. In this work, the outcomes of a team-teaching “internship” for a semester long undergraduate course in electrical engineering at the University Of Michigan are presented. The perspectives of Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

Student Paper Preparing for an Academic Career Through Team Teaching as a Graduate Student Timothy Murphy and Jamie Phillips The University Of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 Introduction Many graduate students pursue their doctorate degree as a milestone towards the attainment of their ultimate goal, to be an educator. Unfortunately, many of these students will go to graduate schools where they will have little, if any, chance to develop their teaching skills in the face of the research workload necessary to obtain a doctoral degree. Many students will obtain their doctoral degrees at Research I universities, focusing primarily on research, and then end up teaching at schools where there is a greater emphasis on teaching. Typically, a graduate student will have the opportunity to be a teaching assistant for one or more semesters, but as these positions are commonly for lab classes or discussion sections, the student does not gain experience in the actual preparation, delivery, and assessment of an entire course. However, if the student graduates and is able to obtain an academic faculty position, that is exactly what they will be expected to do, most likely during their first semester on the job. Depending on what has been left behind by the last professor to teach the class, a new professor may have to develop all of the lecture material, a syllabus, homework problems, examinations, and possibly laboratory experiments. This is a daunting task for anyone, but especially so for someone who has absolutely no experience. Consequently, incorporating some type of voluntary teaching education into the PhD curriculum could provide graduates who are better prepared for their first faculty position and more confident that they are making the right choice in pursing a career as an educator. In this work, a one-semester junior-level electrical engineering class is taught by a team of one faculty member (mentor, Phillips) and myself, a PhD-seeking graduate student (mentee, Murphy). The purpose of the project is to provide me with ‘real-world’ teaching experience that will help me as a future junior faculty member as well as help me make an informed decision as to whether a career in teaching is right for me. I will discuss my motivations for participating in this project, the lessons that I learned while participating, the extent of the time commitment, and the impact of the project on me regarding the two goals stated above. The results of midterm and end-of-term class evaluations are also presented to assess the attitudes of the students towards the project. The Team Teaching Experiment In the Fall semester of 2004, the course “EECS 320 – Introduction To Semiconductor Devices” was taught using the team teaching approach. This course is an introductory course in my field of study and is representative of a course that I would probably be assigned to teach immediately after obtaining a faculty position. There were approximately 100 undergraduate students Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education