Welcome back to Court Vision.

Congress is racing the calendar. A landmark AI jury trial got delayed again. And NIL deals cleared $225M in just 2 months. 

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Let's get into it.

The Protect College Sports Act, from GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, would create national NIL standards that override the patchwork of state laws schools and collectives currently build deals around.

It's picked up serious muscle. Broadcasters, athlete-advocacy groups, universities, and conferences including the Big Ten and SEC are all lobbying on the text. Sixty colleges lobbied on it in the second quarter, Ohio State, Michigan, and Notre Dame among them.

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The clock: a Senate cloture vote is scheduled for mid-to-late September. Even if it clears the Senate, it still needs the House before a five-week October recess eats the calendar ahead of the midterms.

My take: the state-law workarounds a lot of collectives and deal structures currently lean on are one cloture vote away from being preempted. That doesn't mean panic. It means stop building anything long-term on a state-specific NIL provision until you know if it survives contact with a federal standard.

Free resource: Check out our free NIL guide here.

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2. The first AI copyright jury trial didn’t happen

Andersen v. Stability AI, the case brought by artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway, was supposed to put a jury in a box on September 8 and get the first US verdict on whether training an image model on copyrighted art is infringement.

It didn't happen. The trial slipped from that date to next April.

Meanwhile, the market isn’t waiting for the courts to figure this out. Anthropic finalized a $1.5 billion settlement in July, which comes out to roughly $3,000 for each copyrighted work involved. Importantly, the case involved pirated copies of books, not a ruling that using copyrighted material to train AI is automatically illegal. The law is still being worked out, but businesses aren’t waiting around.

My take: the market stopped waiting for "the case" to resolve a while ago. It's already pricing the outcome. If you represent a creator, publisher, or studio with a content library and you're negotiating an AI training or licensing clause right now, $3,000 a work is your opening number whether or not a jury ever reaches a verdict on it. Use the number. Don't wait for the trial that keeps not happening.
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Creator-commerce and affiliate deals run on attribution: a click, a code, a pixel that decides who gets paid. Most creators and brands never negotiate what happens when that tracking breaks or a sale gets disputed.

Before you sign an affiliate or commission-based deal, get three things in writing: which party's tracking system is the source of truth, how far back an attribution window runs, and who resolves a disputed sale and how fast. Money is moving off data you probably don't control. Know the rules for when it's wrong.

Visit our resource page here. Free guides for creators, founders, athletes, and more.

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Levanta (Seattle, WA)

A creator-affiliate platform connecting brands with a network of more than 90,000 creators across Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify, handling commission tracking, creator payments, and tax forms. Levanta just closed a $22 million Series B led by Volition Capital, bringing total funding past $43 million, on the back of 80% year-over-year revenue growth.

The plumbing of the product is really the story here. Affiliate marketing is projected to drive more than $240 billion in US e-commerce sales this year, and platforms like Levanta are becoming the layer that decides how creators actually get paid across marketplaces, at scale, with AI-powered discovery tools now built in.

Why I'm watching: when a third-party platform sits between a brand's money and a creator's commission, the platform's terms of service quietly become part of every deal on it. Read those terms like a contract, because they are one.

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It's the promise that one side will cover the other's losses and legal costs if a third party sues over the deal. Everyone skips it as boilerplate. Then an AI tool in your workflow generates something that turns out infringing, and indemnification is the only clause that decides who's writing the check.

Three questions before you sign:

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Push for mutual indemnification, a specific carve-out addressing AI-generated content and training data disputes, and a cap tied to fees actually paid. An uncapped promise to cover someone else's lawsuit is not a formality. It's a blank check with your name on it.

🕑 WORTH YOUR TIME

Forward this to the founder who thinks their contractor's AI-generated assets are automatically theirs. They're not, and neither is the legal bill if it turns out someone else's work trained the tool.

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👋 I'm Drew Jacobs, founder and managing attorney at Jacobs Counsel. We're the firm for founders, athletes, creators, and gaming companies building in the AI age. Full business, brand, and wealth protection. Senior judgment on every matter, AI-augmented workflows, fixed fees whenever the work allows. Built different. Billed different.

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Licensed in New York, New Jersey, and Ohio. This newsletter is general information, not legal advice.