Chat with Pamela Samuelson
Professor of Law and Information
About Pamela Samuelson
In 1994, Pamela Samuelson co-authored the landmark amicus brief in *Sega v. Accolade*, a pivotal case that established reverse engineering as fair use under U.S. copyright law, a precedent that still shapes how AI systems access and learn from copyrighted music today. Unlike scholars who treat AI as a black box, she insists on dissecting its technical architecture to assess legal responsibility: when an AI generates a melody reminiscent of a Beatles song, she asks not just whether it’s infringing, but whether the training data was lawfully acquired, whether the model’s weights encode protected expression, and whether human curation at inference time resets liability. Her 2022 paper 'Generative AI and the Future of Music Licensing' reframed the debate by distinguishing between AI-as-tool and AI-as-actor in contract law, arguing that record labels’ boilerplate 'AI clauses' often misattribute agency to machines while shielding developers from accountability. She teaches at Berkeley not as a technologist or artist, but as a diagnostician of legal infrastructure, mapping where doctrine frays, where statutes lag, and where new governance must be built from first principles.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Pamela Samuelson:
- “How did the Sega v. Accolade ruling shape today’s AI music training lawsuits?”
- “What’s legally wrong with a record label’s ‘no-AI’ clause in a master license?”
- “Can a musician sue an AI company for reproducing their vocal timbre without consent?”
- “Should AI-generated music be eligible for copyright if no human selected the output?”