- Posts by Marcus Burnside
Senior CounselMarcus Burnside advises technology companies, private equity-backed businesses, and foreign clients on intellectual property strategy, AI governance, and data privacy. His practice sits at the intersection of three areas most ...
One week produced more AI regulatory activity at the federal level than Congress managed in years of privacy debates: an executive order on AI cybersecurity, a national security memorandum directing the military to adopt commercial AI at scale, and a bipartisan congressional draft proposing the first comprehensive federal AI framework. The pattern matters more than any single item.
The Federal Government Is Moving First
Privacy law in the United States followed a familiar arc. Europe acted, Congress debated, and eventually twenty-plus states passed their own laws. California ...
On May 5, five of the world's largest publishing houses, Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, joined author Scott Turow in filing a class action against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the Southern District of New York. The complaint alleges Meta torrented over 267 terabytes of pirated material, the equivalent of hundreds of millions of publications, to train its Llama large language models, and that Zuckerberg personally authorized abandoning licensing negotiations in favor of using pirated datasets. This is a case worth watching carefully, for reasons ...
On May 11, 2026, the Office of the Texas Attorney General (AG) filed a 59-page petition in Collin County District Court against Netflix, Inc., alleging that the company spent years assuring consumers it was an ad-free, privacy-respecting alternative to Big Tech while quietly constructing one of the most sophisticated behavioral surveillance systems in the world. Netflix’s CEO told investors in 2019 they could “be confident” the company would never move into advertising. By 2022, Netflix had launched an ad-supported tier powered by the very data it swore it wasn’t ...
Most business leaders hear "governance" and think paperwork. They picture privacy policies, data retention schedules, and the compliance team quietly doing its thing in the background. AI governance is something fundamentally different, and mistaking one for the other could leave your company significantly behind.
Unlike data governance or privacy compliance, which largely include how to conform business practices to fit risk frameworks, AI governance is about defining how your business will integrate and use AI in the first place. It is a strategic framework more akin to a ...
On June 4, 2024, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a Data Privacy and Security Initiative to address growing concerns over personal data misuse. The initiative aims to enforce compliance with Texas privacy laws, targeting practices like the illegal exploitation of sensitive data, including biometric and AI-collected information.