Planner 5D v. Facebook

The court in Planner 5D v. Facebook, one of the first cases about trade secrets in artificial intelligence datasets, has granted the motion to dismiss on the copyright claims and denied the motion on the trade secret claims.

Trade secrets. The court held that the amended complaint sufficiently pleaded that the Planner 5D data files were trade secrets and that the defendants used improper means to acquire those trade secrets.

Defendants first argued that the Planner 5D files were not trade secrets. Princeton contended that Planner 5D designed its website to transmit object or scene data files to users’ browsers, where they were automatically stored in the browser’s cache, which enabled any user to access and reproduce those files. While the terms of use prohibited downloading material generally and prohibited using scraping tools, the terms of use expressly excluded “page caching” from the list of prohibited activities. Princeton relied on multiple exhibits and a declaration purportedly showing these technical details, but the court rejected much of that evidence because courts typically do not consider extrinsic evidence (e.g., exhibits not attached to the complaint) to resolve a motion to dismiss.
Continue Reading Planner 5D v. Facebook: Trade Secrets and Copyright Update

Judge William Orrick of the Northern District of California held a hearing last week to address 12(b)(6) motions to dismiss by Facebook and Princeton University in UAB “Planner5D” v. Facebook, Inc., et al., Case No. 19-CV-03132 (N.D. Cal.). This appears to be one of the first trade secret misappropriation and copyright cases relating to artificial intelligence datasets.

Plaintiff Planner 5D has a website with a home design tool to allow customers to digitally design their own home, office, or landscape. As alleged by Planner 5D, the tool uses thousands of object and scene files as seed data sets to train machine learning algorithms. The complaint alleges that Princeton used software tools to obtain secret internet addresses where the object and scene files were hidden and then scraped the website to obtain the files, ultimately making the data available to Princeton researchers. Princeton then allegedly shared that data with Facebook. Planner 5D contends that, although the images themselves are viewable on the internet, the underlying datafiles and secret internet addresses that were scraped by Princeton, as well as the file locations, are trade secrets.
Continue Reading Planner 5D v. Facebook: Trade Secrets and Artificial Intelligence Hearing

UAB dba Planner 5D sued Facebook and Princeton for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation under both the Defend Trade Secrets Act and California UTSA, based on use of an AI dataset. The plaintiff alleges that it owns a large dataset of three-dimensional objects and scenes. Princeton allegedly downloaded thousands of scenes by scraping the