Unjust Enrichment as a Remedy for AI's Unauthorised Use of Protected Data

TEXT ANALYSIS: "Unjust Enrichment as a Remedy for AI's Unauthorised Use of Protected Data"

THE DISSECTION

This paper proposes that courts abandon the difficult task of proving IP infringement or privacy violations and instead use unjust enrichment doctrine—a tort mechanism focused on recovering ill-gotten gains rather than proving wrongful conduct. The core argument: instead of arguing AI companies broke the law, argue they got richer from your work and should pay it back.

THE CORE FALLACY

The paper operates inside a legal framework that assumes human creative work has durable economic value, when the DT framework reveals that AI severs this from the demand side entirely. Even if courts adopt the unjust enrichment remedy wholesale, the paper never asks: what happens when the demand for human creative labor collapses below the threshold where any licensing revenue matters?

The paper is solving the wrong problem. It assumes the battle is over compensation—getting AI companies to pay. The real discontinuity is that AI doesn't need to pay you; it needs to replace you. Winning the licensing dispute is like winning the right to charge rent in a building that's being demolished.

HIDDEN ASSUMPTIONS

1. Creative work retains extractable economic value. The entire remedy depends on AI companies having gained something from human data that can be measured and clawed back. This requires human content to remain an input rather than a product being surplussed.
2. Enforcement infrastructure exists. Courts can compel AI companies to pay restitution. This ignores the reality of jurisdictional arbitrage, offshore operations, and the extreme asymmetry between a human creator's legal resources and an AI lab's.
3. The market for human creative output survives the transition. Even if you win the unjust enrichment claim, your underlying economic position depends on people still needing human-made content. Unjust enrichment doesn't stop the demand destruction.
4. Legal remedy precedes systemic displacement. The paper treats this as a legal technicality rather than a symptom of a structural economic death spiral.

SOCIAL FUNCTION

Legal R&D for Transition Management. This paper's actual social function is providing intellectual cover for the legal profession to extract fees from an industry in collapse while selling creators the comforting fiction that a legal framework can preserve their economic relevance. It's a sophisticated version of "have your lawyer call my lawyer"—theater that delays rather than solves.

The paper also serves as prestige signaling within legal academia: producing scholarship that addresses the AI/copyright interface without confronting the DT implications. It's legally rigorous and strategically irrelevant.

THE VERDICT

The paper treats the death of the human creative economy as a litigation problem. Unjust enrichment is a band-aid on a structural hemorrhage. Even in the most favorable ruling scenario—courts universally adopt the remedy, enforcement is perfect, restitution flows to creators—the underlying mechanism remains unchanged: AI commoditizes human creative output until it is economically indistinguishable from tap water. The paper's elegant legal architecture is describing how to rearrange deck chairs on a vessel already beneath the waterline.

The only winners here are law firms, academics publishing in the right journals, and AI companies that get to operate under a legitimized licensing framework rather than outright expropriation.

Class: Sophisticated transition management theater. Useful only to the extent it generates billable hours and academic citations. Irrelevant to survival.