Recap of the 2025 Internet Law Works-in-Progress Conference

On March 8, 2025, the High Tech Law Institute hosted the 2025 Internet Law Works-in-Progress at Santa Clara University. A short recap:

Reconvening After a 6-Year Hiatus. The conference series started in 2011, rotating annually between Santa Clara Law and New York Law School until 2019. The 2020 NYLS edition was scheduled for mid-March 2020, but the pandemic shutdown kiboshed that plan. NYLS hastily moved that event online, but it wasn’t the same. Ironically, as much as this community relies upon and embraces the Internet, an Internet Law conference is better in person. As a result, there was a lot of excitment about reconnecting in physical space. Attendees traveled from all over the country and globe, with 16 states (including DC) and 4 continents represented.

ChatGPT-Scripted Introduction. I personally wrote my introductory remarks. However, in a nod to the community’s high interest in AI, I also asked ChatGPT to write a conference introduction. Initially, ChatGPT produced a bland and uninspired introduction, but its output dramatically improved when I asked for a rewrite referencing Star Trek. Here’s the final version:

Attention, Starfleet legal officers and esteemed scholars of cyberspace! Welcome to the 2025 Internet Law Works-in-Progress conference, where we boldly go where no Internet law conference has gone before!

The digital frontier is a chaotic Neutral Zone—AI is evolving faster than Data on an espresso binge, tech giants are amassing power like the Borg, and cybersecurity threats are multiplying like tribbles. The legal framework? Let’s just say we’re one bad ruling away from a full-scale temporal paradox.

This is a true Kobayashi Maru—no easy answers, just high-stakes dilemmas. Will we regulate or be assimilated? Will digital governance bring balance to the Federation, or are we hurtling toward a Ferengi marketplace of unchecked capitalism? Some of you are Kirks—breaking the rules to get results. Some are Spocks—insisting on logic. And some of you are definitely Q—here to stir up chaos just for fun.

But one thing is clear: resistance to this discussion is futile! So, set phasers to engage, prepare for warp-speed discourse, and let’s make this the most illogical conference to miss.

Helm, set course for the first panel. Engage! 🖖

Zentangle Art-Making. For game night, my wife Lisa Goldman taught a Zentangle class. With her guidance, participants made two art pieces (1, 2).

The US Copyright Office requires copyright registrants to disclose if they used generative AI in the process of creating the work, and the office denies copyright registrations for any portions created by generative AI. If participants want to register their copyrights in their Zentangle art, as a joke (?) we prepared a certificate a(i)ttesting that the Zentangle art was generative AI-free. The A(I)ttestation reads:

I, Eric Goldman, a human without any cyborg components or neural implants, hereby certify that the above-named individual prepared their Zentangle artwork at Santa Clara University School of Law on March 8, 2025, exclusively using their human creativity and without any assistance from artificial “intelligence,” generative or otherwise.

Associate Dean Eric Goldman
Chief Validator of AI Inputs
March 8, 2025

Next Year in NYC. The 2026 conference will be hosted by James Grimmelmann and Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, NYC. More details will be coming soon. Hope to see you there!

Photo album.

Roundup of past Internet Law WIP events.