Cadio Zirpoli

San Francisco
Cadio Zirpoli's expertise primarily lies in antitrust suits, where he has played a pivotal role in resolving some of the largest electronics antitrust cases. More recently, his work extends to initiating groundbreaking generative artificial intelligence-related litigation against some of the industry's biggest names, including Stability AI, OpenAI and Google.
Zirpoli said his interest in AI law was sparked by the years of positive and negative reporting about AI in the news, drawing him to the complexities and challenges it presents.
"I enjoy and appreciate art and creativity in all its forms, so I began to get alarmed when I read and heard disturbing accounts of artists, coders and authors who claimed their creative work was being illegally appropriated by tech companies' AI and machine learning technology without consent, credit, compensation or transparency," he said. "This unfair threat to their livelihood touched me and made me want to help them. It seemed fundamentally unfair that these creators were losing control of their life's work without any compensation while the tech companies were building their billions of dollars in valuation on their work."
One of Zirpoli's lawsuits is against GitHub Copilot, a commercial generative AI product developed by OpenAI and GitHub. Doe 1 v. GitHub, Inc., 4:22-cv-06823 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 3, 2022).
The product, which outputs computer code, sometimes verbatim from the code it was trained on, became a point of contention for not providing attribution to the original creators.
"Copilot is based on a large language model developed by OpenAI and GitHub that was trained on plaintiffs' and class members' computer code without credit, consent or compensation, and which outputs portions of that code verbatim without the required attribution," Zirpoli said.
The case is in the discovery phase.
In a separate matter against OpenAI, Zirpoli's clients allege that the AI company infringed on the copyrights of a group of book authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, by using their copyrighted works to train ChatGPT, its generative AI large language model. Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc., 3:23-cv-03223-AMO (N.D. Cal., filed June 28, 2023).
The lawsuit alleges direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, negligence, unjust enrichment and various violations of California's unfair competition laws.
"There's a perception among some in the tech community that our clients and our firm are Luddites using litigation to thwart progress that will benefit society. Nothing could be further from the truth," Zirpoli said. "Our goal is to get our clients the attribution and compensation that they deserve. Given the novelty of our cases, we and the courts are trying to figure out where copyright law applies and where it doesn't. When we first filed these cases, we received death threats and accusations that we were in cahoots with foreign governments to slow the progress in the arms race that is now AI."