Obsidian & 2nd Brains: Viability v Liability ?

***This message does not constitute legal advice. I am not a licensed attorney and any conclusions or opinions are my own. Should you have questions, please see a licensed intellectual property attorney. ***

@Jake Van Clief

@Jordan Shaw

@Bas Rosario

The issue here is, the environment regarding intellectual property as it's associated with LLMs and their use of copyrighted or other protected content for the training of their models was for quite some time very ambiguous. I myself began playing with tools for genAI purposes more than two years ago, but I could see immediately the potential liabilities from such activities due to my time in the film industry and in my experience drawing patent illustrations. Ultimately I stopped what I was doing and waited for clarity to be provided regarding the environment and potential liability that could arise from publishing genAI content or utilizing such tools in my work.

Since that time we've had a couple cases come to completion to actually provide some clarity and begin to set precedent within the US legal system, the first of which is: Vacker v. Eleven Labs, In which the parties reached a settlement on August 18th 2025. The financial details regarding the settlement remain confidential under the terms of that agreement, so we aren't entirely sure as to the exact outcome; however, what is clear is that the risk is real.

https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/08/23/parties-in-vacker-v-eleven-labs-tell-judge-theyve-reached-a-settlement-1st-in-the-ai-copyright-litigation/

More recently, there was an additional settlement agreement in Bartz v Anthropic, the news of which is detailed in the article below, which was from April 8, 2026. In this settlement we do know the monetary value the plaintiffs were awarded. $1.5B, was the amount, which was the largest copyright infringement settlement in US history... for anyone unfamiliar with proceeding, let that sink in.

https://authorsguild.org/advocacy/artificial-intelligence/what-authors-need-to-know-about-the-anthropic-settlement/

David McCandless of https://informationisbeautiful.net/ has published A wonderful info-graph detailing the size and scope of the numerous cases that have been filed recently, now that that precedent I was waiting for, along with so many others, has indeed been set. As you can see below, The size and scope of these filings is massive and involves many legacy companies being pitted against major brands in the artificial intelligence ecosystem.

Now to the point at hand. Tools such as Obsidian and other second brain technologies have the potential to create similar liability for yourself, if you're developing a product to take to market. It's my opinion however, that the danger does not rest with the tool itself, but rather in how you use it. Scraping information off of the Internet to utilize in the development of any of your products is exactly what all of these firms have already done and for which the courts have found them liable. For those of you in my network that are pursuing development with Claude Code and other AI tools, this commentary is for you. It's my opinion that building products that are connected to a second brain source of information that's curated on copyrighted and protected material, is in fact reproducing the exact same error in a microcosm. My plan is to develop a product developed with Claude Code yes, but one that's been trained specifically on no other content other than that which I have created myself. I personally view this as the only way to produce a product that's free of future liability. My product is generative patent art, but my business is risk management, both for my clients and for myself and this is a risk so massive that it simply cannot be ignored. I urge caution for anyone developing products that they plan to take to market and would recommend that you seek proper counsel from an intellectual property attorney, regarding your activities and the development of your product(s), so that you might succeed in your endeavors and manage your risk congruently.

*** Again the whole of this article is my opinion alone and I am not a licensed attorney and this does not constitute legal advice ***

This is the way.

Yours sincerely,

Etan

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Obsidian & 2nd Brains: Viability v Liability ?