[The IPKat] Fordham 33 (Report 9): Sports, media and entertainment

[Annsley Merelle Ward]

Uncertainty was the theme of the 
sports, media and entertainment panel The IPKat was back in Fordham, with the Spring skies and the chirping birds gracing the streets of the Upper West Side. As a proud and long-standing partner with the Fordham IP Conference, now in its 33rd year, the IPKat is thrilled to partner with the students of Fordham for reports from this years’ conference. This report comes from Tara Amine (Former EUIPO Observatory Trainee, and current LL.M in Intellectual Property and Information Technology at Fordham Law School).

Over to Tara:    

"Thursday afternoon's Blended Session 3C brought together an energetic group of panelists to tackle the question of the biggest challenges facing the sports, media and entertainment industries. The session was chaired by Stan McCoy of the Entertainment Software Association, with contributions from Michelle Woods of WIPO, Laurie Rechdart of IFPI, Han Kim of Troy Gould Attorneys, Ashleigh Landis at Warner Brothers Discovery, Ursula Feindor-Schmidt of Lausen Rechtsanwälte representing the publishing industry, and Catherine Lovrics of Marks & Clerk Law.

The panel went into detail about what practitioners are facing on the ground. The overarching theme of the session was one of uncertainty, not just legal uncertainty, but commercial and practical uncertainty about where AI leaves rights holders, platforms, insurers and enforcers. As a panelist put bluntly: the pace of technological change is far outpacing the law.

It is no longer simply a question of asking for permission or seeking forgiveness. There is, in many cases, no rule at all. Nowhere is this more acute than in the insurance context: there are currently no insurance products available for AI-related liability, meaning that any indemnity offered may ultimately be worth nothing, and infringers could prove judgment-proof.

Text and data mining was described as an "existential" issue for creators, because without it, building a robust AI model is close to impossible. The question of whether text and data mining is itself permissible, not just when done unlawfully but as a matter of principle, was raised and left deliberately open. An audience member pushed back, arguing that lawful access is the real key: if rights holders have technical protection measures in place, the focus should be on enforcing those rather than relitigating the fundamentals. The panel, while agreeing in part, discussed the nuances of copyrighted content and AI models that have already been trained on this content without express permission, using examples from the music industry. The question was ultimately left open: how do we tackle those already existing models when we think about building a legal framework for AI?

On the global dimension, Michelle Woods noted that WIPO Member States, particularly developing countries, are not only looking to engage with the AI conversation but are increasingly looking to WIPO to help them build out their IP frameworks more broadly, including in the context of sports. Developing countries in particular are wary of being left behind, not as passive hosts for data centers while their content is scraped, but as active participants in the creative economy. This connects directly to this year's World IP Day theme of Sports, which signals just how seriously the international community is taking sport as a vehicle for IP-led economic development. The panel noted that name, image and likeness (NIL) rights remain a live and evolving issue in this space. Our moderator raised a rather thorny question of what happens when a likeness arises coincidentally rather than by design. While it was left open, it remains something to think about.

To end, the panel shifted gears to enforcement in sports, where Catherine Lovrics highlighted a notable enforcement innovation: a 2024 Federal Court decision, Rogers Media Inc. v. John Doe, in Canada, that accepted dynamic site blocking as a legitimate tool for broadcasters struggling with live takedown in the streaming context. Where traditional enforcement mechanisms had proved too slow to keep up with live piracy, the courts, in Lovrics' words, ultimately married technology and the law. It is an example worth watching for jurisdictions still searching for workable enforcement models in an era where infringing content moves faster than any injunction."