Welcome back to Court Vision.

Three things happened this month: 

The people with the most at stake weren't the ones making the decisions. Nobody voted on any of it. That's the theme.

Let's get into it.

The College Sports Commission's July 2026 report: 34,195 NIL deals approved since NIL Go launched, worth $355.24 million total.

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Buried in that report: a rule change. Deals between $600 and $15,000 no longer get reviewed for "reasonable range of compensation" until an athlete hits $50,000 in total associated-entity deals for the school year. Translation: the review threshold just moved from one deal to a running tab.

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This comes right after an arbitrator sided with two Georgia athletes in June, whose deals got blocked under the old model. The CSC lost, then rewrote the model that made it lose.

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My take: the CSC isn't loosening the rules because it got generous. It's loosening them because it kept losing arbitrations under the old ones. If you're advising an athlete on a deal in that $600 to $50,000 band, the CSC isn't watching as closely as it was in June. That doesn't mean the deal is safe. It means nobody's checking your math but you. Do the fair-market-value work anyway. The exemption is a gap, not a shield.

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2. Google became the third AI company on the publisher hit list
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Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action against Google in Manhattan federal court. The claim: Gemini trained on millions of copyrighted books, and Google allegedly altered copyright metadata to cover it up. An internal document reportedly flagged fine exposure between $10 billion and $100 billion.

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The same publisher group sued Meta over Llama back in May. Google's now fighting the same fight on two fronts, since a separate consolidated Gemini case is already running in Northern California.

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Meanwhile Anthropic just finished paying for its version of this problem. A federal judge gave final approval on July 20 to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement over training data, the largest copyright recovery in US history.

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My take: that $1.5 billion number isn't just a headline anymore. It's a comp. Every AI licensing negotiation happening right now has that figure sitting on the table whether anyone says it out loud or not. If you're a creator, a publisher, or a gaming studio with a content library, your AI training clause just got real leverage behind it. Silence in that clause was always a gift to whoever drafted the contract. Now it's an expensive one.

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The College Sports Commission just rewrote its own compliance model mid-season. Regulators do this constantly, and most contracts don't say what happens when they do.

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Look for (or add) a clause that says what happens if a law, regulation, or governing body's rule changes during the term. Not force majeure. A specific "regulatory change" provision.

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Without it, you're stuck re-negotiating from scratch every time an agency or governing body moves the goalposts, usually with less leverage than you had on day one. With it, you've already agreed on the fix: repricing, renegotiation window, or exit.

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Rules will keep changing. Your contract shouldn't have to be rewritten from zero every time they do.

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

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Canary Technologies (San Francisco)

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Canary is an AI-powered guest messaging and hospitality operations platform. The company raised $80 million and, earlier this year, acquired OpenKey, a mobile key and access-control platform.

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The product isn't the story. The combination is. One company now holds your guests' personal data, their payment information, and the software controlling who can physically get into a room. That used to be three separate vendors with three separate contracts and three separate points of failure. Now it's one.

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Every hotel and hospitality group using either platform inherited a data relationship they didn't renegotiate. The acquisition happened. Your contract terms may or may not have moved with it.

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Why I'm watching: the hospitality groups that check what "vendor acquisition" does to their data agreements will catch the gap before a guest does. Everyone else finds out during a breach notification.

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This clause decides whether your contract transfers automatically if the other party gets bought, sold, or merged. Most people never read it because it's boilerplate. Then their vendor gets acquired and it's the only clause that matters.

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Three questions before you sign:

Require consent for assignment. Make privacy and data terms explicitly survive any sale. Build in an exit if the new owner isn't someone you'd have signed with in the first place.

🕑 WORTH YOUR TIME

Forward this to whoever on your team just renewed a vendor contract without reading the assignment clause. They're the ones who need it.

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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.