I learned about Pamela Samuelson’s work during a phone call with a mentor of mine, and thought she’d make a great guest for Coffee and Content, the show I co-host with Patrick Bosek, Heretto‘s CEO. We’d covered legal topics important to content creators before, but never with someone this specialized in tech law. I’m hoping to arrange for her to speak to us later this year.
Pamela Samuelson, for those unfamiliar with her work, is a MacArthur Fellow, recognized in 1997 for her scholarship in intellectual-property law and computing technology. She has also participated in major copyright cases through amicus briefs, including Google v. Oracle, the Supreme Court case that found Google’s copying of portions of the Java API to be fair use.
Much of the argument over AI and copyright has centered on whether using copyrighted work to train a model is infringement or fair use. Samuelson’s February 2024 column asks a different question: what happens if a plaintiff wins?
This matters if your organization is using an AI tool (writing assistant, a support chatbot, a code-completion plugin).
Depending on what a court decides, the remedy could range from a modest damages payment to an order that the company destroy the underlying AI model entirely; taking the tool your team relies on out of existence, with no guarantee of a replacement.
At the time Samuelson’s column was published (February 2024), she counted 16 active lawsuits against generative AI developers. Copyright Alliance reported in June 2026 that in the two-plus years since, the number rose to well over 100.
Most of the complaints Samuelson examined sought familiar remedies such as damages and injunctive relief. Four explicitly asked courts to destroy models, and one asked a court to create an entirely new regulatory body. I decided to focus on those unusual requests in this post. Let’s take a look at what’s happened with them since Samuelson wrote about them.
