2025 - 2026 Events
Ideas and Expression — What Really Is Free and What Isn’t? Observations from Entertainment Litigation with Elaine Kim — Cosponsored by CILS and KHIPLA
Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | In-Person Only
Generally, ideas have been thought of as free, whereas original expression is the stuff of copyright. But at least in certain circumstances under California law, ideas aren’t free. And we will increasingly encounter expressive works that are not protected by copyright because they were not authored by humans. Meanwhile, courts continue to grapple with the age-old idea/expression dichotomy, and whether and when they can decide that two works are not substantially similar as a matter of law, whether in protectable expression (in copyright infringement cases) or in idea (in idea submission cases). In this talk, Elaine Kim will share some observations about recent cases and trends in entertainment litigation over ideas and expression.
Elaine K. Kim is a partner at Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP (MSK), a law firm with deep roots in Los Angeles’s entertainment industry since 1908. Elaine currently co-chairs MSK’s Litigation department, and previously co-chaired the firm’s Intellectual Property practice group. She specializes in intellectual property and entertainment matters, and counsels and represents studios, production companies, game developers, and other content creators. She has defended studios, producers, and writers against copyright infringement and idea submission claims, involving popular films and television shows — sometimes, claims asserted by multiple plaintiffs over the same property. She has also prosecuted copyright claims against infringers, and counsels clients on protecting their works. Elaine also serves as an officer and trustee of the Los Angeles Copyright Society, and as an executive committee member of the USC Gould School of Law Intellectual Property Institute.
#TeamHuman: Community Rooted AI Research with Dr. Timnit Gebru — Cosponsored by CILS and UC Davis AI Center in Engineering
Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1001 | Streaming Link
In the last few years, the quest to build so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an undefined system which seemingly can do any task under any circumstance, has captured the public's imagination. Those whose mission has been to build this system, like the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepmind and others, discuss the utopia that will imminently come from building AGI, or the apocalypse that will be caused by it rendering humanity extinct. In this talk, Dr. Gebru discusses the history of the AGI movement, and its link to the 20th century eugenics movement, with those who "christened" the term AGI having the goal of replacing humans with a superior race they call "transhuman AGI." She outlines the harms the quest to build AGI has caused, including labor exploitation, centralization of power and the safety issues associated with building an unscoped system. She closes by giving examples of various movements to resist this trend, including artists' fight to preserve their humanity and dignity with the hashtag #TeamHuman. Dr. Gebru urges the machine learning community to focus on small, constrained, task specific models, and present some of the work from DAIR showing how this approach outperforms the one size fits all trend to building machine learning based models.
Dr. Timnit Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) in 2021 and is currently its Executive Director. She previously co-led Google’s Ethical AI research team, until co-publishing a journal article that critiqued the company’s AI ethics. DAIR publishes interdisciplinary research that brings a greater diversity of perspectives and lived experiences to envisioning the future of AI. Dr. Gebru also co-founded the nonprofit Black in AI and serves on the board of AddisCoder. Time magazine named Dr. Gebru one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022 and one of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2023. Her memoir/manifesto The View from Somewhere is scheduled to publish in fall 2026.
AI Legislation in the US: A Descriptive Analysis with Professor Hemant Bhargava
Thursday, Oct. 16, 2025 | 12 – 1 p.m. | King Hall, Room 1301 | Streaming Link
Professor Bhargava will present his team’s ongoing research examining legislation in the U.S. states to govern production and use of AI tools. As a first step, they built computational tools to facilitate collection of over 1500 AI-related bills proposed over the last 5 years, and to categorize them into a custom-developed taxonomy. Next, they extended the resulting structured database with additional elements of interest, covering political, demographic, and economic factors. Finally, they are examining how these factors shape regulatory efforts and outcomes. This includes inter-state variations in nature of AI legislative proposals, factors that affect successful passage, leader-follow relationships across states and nature of overlap in proposed rules.
Hemant Bhargava, UC Davis Graduate School of Management Distinguished Professor, Jerome and Elsie Suran Chair in Technology Management, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and Center for Analytics and Technology in Society Director, is an academic leader in economic modeling and analysis of technology-based business and markets. His research focuses on decision analytics and how the distinctive characteristics of technology goods influence specific elements of operations, marketing, and competitive strategy, and the implications it holds for competitive markets and technology-related policy. He has examined deeply these issues in specific industries including platform businesses, information and telecommunications industries, healthcare, media and entertainment, and electric vehicles.