The Weekly Mutiny #7: The Record Is Inside the Machine
Bot Mutiny |
Five filings in one week, and every one of them turns on evidence: who holds it, who has to produce it, and what a court does once it is gone.
The Weekly Mutiny #7: The Record Is Inside the Machine
Five filings in one week, and every one of them turns on evidence: who holds it, who has to produce it, and what a court does once it is gone.
August 31, 2026
Google told a federal court this week that it cannot produce a list of the copyrighted works it trained on, because no such list exists. The only record of what went into the model, the company argued, is the training data itself.
Five stories this week, and every one of them is about evidence. Who holds it, who has to hand it over, and what a court does once it is gone. The courts did all the talking; nothing else moved.
Google does not have to say what it took
On August 24, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee denied a motion for relief in In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation in the Northern District of California. Plaintiffs had asked Google to identify which of their works sat inside the training sets. Magistrate Judge van Keulen had already run what the court described as an exhaustive and contentious discovery process, and concluded that only the datasets themselves would answer the question. Because plaintiffs already have access to those datasets, the court treated the request as redundant. The order does not find that Google trained on nothing of theirs. It finds that asking Google to say so is asking for a document that was never created.
Adobe wins on specificity, not on innocence
Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley dismissed part of author E. Molly Tanzer's copyright case against Adobe on August 20. Tanzer alleged her books trained two product lines, the SlimLM series and the NVIDIA Nemotron series, by way of shadow libraries she named in the complaint: Library Genesis, Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Anna's Archive. The Nemotron claims failed because she could not plead enough facts to support an inference about where Adobe obtained the books. The court did not rule that Adobe never had them. It ruled she had not shown how they got there, which is the same proof problem as the Google order arriving from the opposite direction.
Perplexity makes the argument a third time
On August 21, Perplexity AI moved to dismiss four counts of CNN's suit in the Southern District of New York. Its memorandum describes the product as an answer engine synthesizing hundreds of billions of webpages, CNN's among them. The copyright defense is that CNN failed to plead specific facts for most of the copyrights it asserts. That makes three filings in one week, from three unrelated defendants, resting on the same load-bearing claim: the plaintiff cannot say precisely enough what was taken. None of the three courts has yet tested whether that is a defect in the complaints or a feature of the technology.
When the mechanism is documented, the case gets a calendar
Magistrate Judge Lynda M. Hill signed a case management order on August 24 setting a multi-year schedule for a proposed class action against Unlock Health, Medicom Digital, and Medicom Health in the Middle District of Tennessee. Plaintiffs allege tracking pixels embedded in online Health Risk Assessment forms transmitted protected health information to Google and TikTok without consent. The forms screened people for anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and lung cancer. This is the week's counterexample. The pixel leaves a trace, the form is a document, and the case proceeds on a timetable rather than dying on a pleading standard.
A spoliation hearing about who has to be in the room
EPAM Systems wants Dmitrii Ilin, the engineer it calls the primary architect of its Synapse software, to testify by live video from the Czech Republic at a September 16 hearing in Philadelphia. The hearing concerns sanctions for spoliation of evidence, and EPAM says Ilin's testimony is central to showing that Gowtham Rao had a motive to destroy it. Rao, a physician with a PhD who is representing himself, wants Ilin to appear in person. A dispute over destroyed evidence has become a dispute over whether a witness has to be physically present to be tested on it.
Friday
The Black Box 006 went out this week. Flock's camera network writes a log entry for every search an officer runs against it, and almost nowhere is anyone required to read those logs. The audit trail exists. Auditing is optional.