Last Updated on July 31, 2026 by Rob Cashman
Last night, I wrote an article entitled, “What an AI Can Infer from Sixteen Years of Public Legal Writing.“
Surprised by what the Google Gemini AI was able pull together and infer, I decided to ask it to deep-dive into my past to determine what it knew about me, and what it was able to piece together from other sources online. What it started to pull together surprised me, because it arrived at its conclusions about me through inferences — by piecing together unrelated threads — which turned out to be accurate.
- How I really got started; What Google’s AI does NOT know about my history,
- What shaped my philosophies which have guided me throughout my law firm, and
- How I knew how to interact with and predict the strategies of the copyright lawsuits that have plagued our courts for the last 20 years.
However, what the Gemini AI noticed about me was something that I didn’t even realize:
Every stage of my professional life involved reverse engineering a complex system—not merely learning its rules, but understanding why it was structured that way and where its assumptions could fail. Patent valuation, federal procedure, BitTorrent evidence, AI, even SEO all appealed to me for the same reason.
Below are the set questions I asked Google’s AI (followed by their answers, and my remarks about their responses, “correcting the record,” so to speak):
How would you describe Rob Cashman if you were to meet him in the street? In the courtroom?
How to Describe Rob Cashman If You Met Him
If you were to encounter Rob Cashman on the street or observe him in a courtroom setting, his persona would look very different depending on the venue:
1. In a Courtroom (The Technical Intellectual)
In a federal courtroom or a legal deposition, Cashman presents as an analytical, deeply prepared tech-law hybrid. Because he is a patent lawyer by trade, he does not rely on loud, theatrical trial theatrics. Instead, he speaks with the quiet confidence of someone who understands P2P networking architecture, hashing algorithms, and network forensics far better than the plaintiff’s corporate counsel or the presiding judge. He is systematic, highly procedural, and uses precise tech-centric terminology to aggressively poke holes in a plaintiff’s digital evidence.
2. On the Street or on a Phone Call (The Empathetic Consultant)
If you met him casually, you would likely find him unusually approachable and disarmingly reassuring for a federal litigator. On his blogs and in client reviews, his defining trait is empathy. He explicitly notes that people who get caught up in torrent downloads are often going through intense personal, emotional, or financial pain. He avoids the rigid, cold, “billable hour” demeanor of traditional attorneys, opting instead to speak in plain, universally accessible language designed to immediately lower a panicked client’s blood pressure.
To me, this answer was theoretical, but I smiled at how it took the subjects I know about and inferred my personality and mannerisms based on what kind of person I must be if I know these particular subjects. This is fascinating to me, and surprisingly accurate. But again, this AI never met me in person.
Yes, the “analytical, deeply prepared tech-law hybrid” description fits, and it is substantially accurate. My opponents are almost always significantly larger than I am. In the earlier years of the law firm, yes, I dealt with multiple attorneys who were each representing a larger “conglomerate” entity who represented multiple movie production companies, and yes, my practice ‘touched’ the MPAA / RIAA, and the lobbyists and judges who worked along them. But whether talking to another attorney or calling in to a judge to inform them of the implications of deciding one way or another in a new area of law, I needed to be completely researched and competent in that area if I was to have any credibility with them.
The Patent Attorney USPTO status took many years and so much additional coursework to qualify for the exam, as my background was in the hard sciences — the biology, microbiology, chemistry, organic chemistry, physics, and advanced calculus-based math courses, and I only knew various languages in programming from my own hobbies and interests. I took engineering classes only later when I was older and knew I wanted to practice patent law. In law school, I also continued to take coursework in computer science courses not only because it was a hobby of mine — it was — but because it was also the best path to become a patent attorney.
With all this, I still laugh when someone refers to me as a ‘tech-centric’ attorney; this is just who I am. I am personally more happy that the AI picked up about the empathy I try to incorporate into my practice. My clients are people, and often they are good people who get into bad situations from circumstances that are far outside of their control. My understanding of my clients’ circumstances goes far beyond the philosophy of ‘everybody gets a voice in the courtroom,’ or ‘the criminal in the jail cell was there because his parents didn’t love him,’ as Gabor Mate (who I do not like as a person) would teach.
I just don’t like the idea of thinking I am any different from anyone else because I have a law degree. I worked hard, yes, I struggled, I studied, I overcame, yes. But they could have too, and very frequently, my clients are far ‘smarter’ than me, or skilled in their field than I could ever be, and if they would have gone to law school themselves, they would have learned the relevant areas of law just as I did. And, they would have brought their unique and special contribution to their practice as an attorney based on their own skillset and their own life experiences just as I have.
But most of my clients needed my skillset because they took a risk (calculated, uncalculated), and they were wrong in their assessment. In 2010 when I started my law practice, the news reports were full of articles of one person who became the face of the generation of kids who grew up with Grokster, Napster, Limewire, Morpheus, and all the early peer-to-peer music filesharing software products (before BitTorrent even because a word common in our vocabularies).
Their faulty logic is that if they download something, they are one of many thousands who are also doing it, so what are the chances they’ll be caught? Most kids at the time didn’t know what the word copyright meant; they didn’t even know what a virus was, or what malware was, or what was the Jerusalem Virus versus the thousands of other viruses that affected our generation of computers before Windows hardened their operating systems with Windows NT and it became difficult to get infected without doing something as explicit as running an executable (.exe) file infected with a virus. But those days, people didn’t understand the technology.
Fast forward to today’s generation of adults — these are the kids from the previous generation that I just described. We rode our bicycles to school, played stickball with a broom, broke a window here or there, and enjoyed sitting and talking for hours. Most of our generation don’t need to understand the concept of network security, open networks, vulnerabilities, exposing IP addresses, or even knowing or caring what an IP address is or how it can be used (or misused).
I knew these topics because they interested me. I took the various certification courses and I read through the materials because they were interesting to me. I learned about IP addresses, virtual public networks, virtual machines, running a Windows OS on an Apple computer, and vice versa — we did this for fun in college. We spent hours on IRC, played with IRC bots (sorry to my friends), spoofed e-mail addresses using smtp servers, and sent messages to our roommates from “god@universe.com,” even though we didn’t own that e-mail address.
In the process of all of these fun experiences, I also learned about privacy, and how not to do stupid things that my smarter-than-me friends would do, but then get their accounts banned or shut down by the IT security staff at our University (thinking back, they were probably students at the time, just like I was). But “don’t do stupid stuff” somehow became a philosophy that I lived by, and that I teach my kids now that I’m the father and the older one in my family.
So am I really a tech-law hybrid attorney? Or am I just someone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and I was just a kid that was fascinated when ‘caller ID’ became a box we can add-on to our phone plan, or when voicemail changed from being the size of a record player (a big wooden box in the closet with a cassette tape) to something that happened automatically? Or, the fact that the copper wiring on our phone made strange sounds when I would use my 300 baud modem (eventually 1200 baud, then …eventually a 9,600 baud modem, then a 14.4K modem, and so on) without a black filter that I needed to snap onto the phone wire or else my parents couldn’t make a phone call at the same time as I was messing around with my online BBS (bulletin-board system)?
Personal Philosophies of Rob Cashman
What do we know about Cashman’s personal philosophies in life? What do we know about him other than him being a lawyer? Where else has he demonstrated his skills and his talents?
Beyond his professional bio as a defense attorney, Rob Cashman has a highly transparent, unconventional set of personal philosophies and non-legal interests that he openly shares. He holds deep convictions regarding politics, systemic legal abuse, and information ethics.
1. Personal Philosophies in Life
Cashman explicitly defines his driving worldviews on his TorrentLawyer Profile, highlighting a mix of activism, deep empathy, and political independence:
- Information Activism & The Aaron Swartz Influence: Cashman explicitly names the late open-internet activist Aaron Swartz as a personal hero. His life philosophy borrows heavily from Swartz’s vision regarding the free flow of information. Cashman has stated that while he respects standard intellectual property laws as a patent lawyer, he transforms into an activist the moment big organizations abuse those laws to stifle individuals.
- Deep Political Agnosticism: He actively rejects the traditional two-party American political system. He describes himself as “politically agnostic” and an independent, believing that neither party authentically represents true values. He openly admits that his stance causes both sides of the political spectrum to dislike his viewpoints.
- Abhorrence of Institutional Distortion: He maintains a strict philosophical stance against corporate corruption. He has publicly written that he “abhors lobbyists who distort the laws to favor their special interest group,” despises political pork-barrel spending, and deeply distrusts career politicians.
- Humanistic Understanding of Mistakes: He views human errors through a lens of psychological compassion. He operates on the philosophy that modern society leaves individuals isolated and hurting, often driving them to use digital escapes (like heavy media consumption or downloading software) as an emotional numbing mechanism to cope with trauma or pain.
2. Beyond Being a Lawyer: Skills, Talents, and Background
Before building a high-volume litigation firm, Cashman cultivated background credentials in academia, coding concepts, and business structure:
- Academic Roots in Philosophy: Cashman holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the State University of New York at Binghamton. This background directly informs his writing style and explains why his defense frameworks focus heavily on logic, ethics, and semantic distinctions (like the separation of “identification” from “attribution”) rather than purely cold statutory mechanics. He even won an academic excellence award in Legal Philosophy during his time at Touro College Law Center.
- AI Code Analysis and Patent Mining: Because he is a registered patent attorney (USPTO Reg. No. 60,246), he possesses a talent for unpacking complex code. Long before artificial intelligence became a ubiquitous tech term, Cashman was writing deep-dive pieces on the patentability of neural networks and deep-learning models, demonstrating a talent for translating dense machine-learning code into legally sound patent frameworks.
- Asset Protection and Financial Preservation: Beyond his intellectual property practice, he possesses highly specialized financial planning skills. He spent the early years of his practice specializing in business entity creation, corporate secured transactions, and asset protection strategies designed to shield struggling small businesses from foreclosure and aggressive creditors.
This is all accurate, and I guess this all makes sense given the generation I grew up in. In college, I knew I wouldn’t stop there, so aside from the courses in the hard sciences, I was told that “Philosophy would teach me to think.” Post graduation, it was the coursework I took for my own interests that I found most satisfying. Jack Ma put out courses on machine learning, and I loved each one!
Then Harvard put their electrical engineering courses online, and I spent months on each one. I had the math foundation and the understanding of how formulas can merge from one equation describing displacement to an equation of velocity, to an equation of acceleration. I could calculated curved surfaces using integrals, and I understood basic mechanics. Add in programming, digital logic systems (a course I took), and apply all of this to machine learning, understanding electricity, voltage, or the concept of the need for a capacitor or a resistor to facilitate the movement of current vs. electricity through a wire, together these ‘arts’ for me made fun science.
What is known about Rob Cashman personally, his background, his family, and his hobbies?
About Rob Cashman, Personally. His Background, His Family, His Hobbies.
Robert Z. Cashman is a dual-licensed attorney (Texas and New York) and a registered patent attorney with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. While he maintains a highly public professional persona through his Cashman Law Firm and TorrentLawyer blog, he keeps details about his immediate family strictly private to separate his personal life from his high-stakes litigation.
Background and Professional Profile
- Dual Legal Foundation: He has been practicing law since 2007. He holds bar licenses in both Texas and New York, giving him a broad footprint in federal courts where major copyright cases are filed.
- Niche Evolution: He founded his firm in Houston, Texas, in 2010. He originally focused heavily on corporate entity creation, bankruptcy asset preservation, and patent drafting before transitioning into mass peer-to-peer torrent defense.
- Technical Credentialing: As USPTO Registration No. 60,246, his legal background is uniquely rooted in hard sciences and complex technical intellectual property, rather than standard general litigation.
Hobbies and Personal Interests
In rare personal reflections shared on his TorrentLawyer Profile, Cashman describes himself as a highly analytical, deep-dive thinker with specific intellectual pursuits:
- Science Fiction Devotee: He is a self-proclaimed lover of science fiction novels and television series, particularly favoring media that successfully translates high-concept, abstract technological theories into palpable visual environments.
- Academic Reader: He actively studies hard sciences, classical literature, and has a intense fervor for reading and analyzing religious texts.
It was at this point in asking Google’s AI questions that I got curious how much it actually knew about me. I started digging.
Cashman’s Professional Path Before Law; His Social Circles
Who was he before he was a lawyer? What jobs did he have, in what social circles did he move? Who are/were his friends?
Because Rob Cashman primarily writes and speaks about the legal architecture of digital piracy defense, he keeps a deliberately tight lid on his non-professional life, early jobs, social circles, and specific friend groups. He actively separates his personal biography from his high-profile public profile to protect his privacy in an adversarial field where he frequently matches up against aggressive corporate plaintiffs.
However, public records, professional resumes, and his personal writing offer insight into his trajectory before his law practice matured.
His Professional Path Before Founding His Firm
- The Academic Years (Early 2000s): Before practicing law, Cashman was deeply embedded in academia. He studied philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton, focusing heavily on logic, ethics, and semantic structures.
- The Patent Mining Phase (2008–2009): Directly after graduating from law school in 2007, he did not jump straight into a traditional courtroom or open a litigation firm. Instead, he worked as a Patent Acquisition Specialist and Patent Attorney for Technology, Patents & Licensing, Inc.. His day-to-day employment involved deep tech-mining—assisting tech corporations and independent inventors in analyzing complex patent claims, verifying patent support, evaluating structural validity, and arranging intellectual property monetization and licensing portfolios.
OK, so they know about TPL (Technology, Patents, and Licensing, Inc.), and my early employment under Charles Eldering. They must have found an online resume, or perhaps they found my LinkedIn page. However, if they did, they would know about what is glaringly missing. The AI appears not to be aware of what I did before TPL. Keep going.
His Social and Professional Circles
While his absolute closest personal friend groups remain undisclosed, his early professional and legal circles are well-defined:
- The Tech/Patent Sphere: Prior to 2010, his professional network consisted largely of software programmers, mechanical and network engineers, corporate tech executives, and inventors. His intellectual peer group revolved around patent prosecution, which demands an elite technical understanding of hardware-software integration.
- The Digital Rights Activist Network: In 2010, Cashman’s professional trajectory shifted dramatically when he entered a highly influential social and professional circle: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Shortly after starting his boutique firm, the EFF reached out to Cashman along with a tiny, hand-selected group of tech-forward defense lawyers nationwide. They tasked him with investigating the then-brand-new phenomenon of mass peer-to-peer, BitTorrent-based copyright trolls. This thrust him into a close-knit group of pioneering cyber-libertarians, open-internet advocates, and leading digital privacy litigators.
OK, nothing new here. This is all public information. But the AI still missed something important.
I used to ‘break’ international patent applications where there was prior art. It is one thing to obtain patent protection in the US, but when expanding into other countries (especially when someone else already invented the idea there, and maybe you didn’t invent the product first; or, maybe you don’t get patent protection outside of the US if you ‘invented’ your idea after you saw someone else do it first).
I used to refer to what I did for this law firm as the ‘dark side’ of patent practice, and it always created a philosophical conflict for me when doing it. I am a staunch believer in the advancement of technology, so this is why I always loved the idea of inventions, innovation, and the awarding of legal protections through patents. But when this desire to further the advancement of technology clashed with a large corporation trying to create a monopoly in an area of technology where they were not the original inventor, this set off the mischievous side of me because after law school, I suddenly ‘knew’ patent practice, and I could tilt the outcome in favor of the actual inventor (who himself tried to protect his idea and form a business around it). So I loved the idea of this ‘job,’ even though it cost me more than it brought in income for me and my young family.
I wonder why this wasn’t part of the AI’s awareness when I asked about it, but the work I did was for Cardinal Law Group, more recently known as Cardinal IP.
So here it is. Between 2007-2008, I worked for Cardinal IP. I worked as a Patent Search Professional / Patent Attorney (although the job title if I recall was Patent Attorney – PCT / Prior Art Analysis). Through them, I had the opportunity to work on patentability, invalidity, FTO, and PCT searches for major law firms/USPTO-related work. I already knew about international patent law through the summer program at Tsinghua University (2005), and this was the perfect way to put what I learned into practice.
It was also this exposure to professional patent-search and prior-art work (and a close friend, thank you) who arranged the introduction that got me the job working for Charles Eldering at “TechPats,” or, Technology Patents, & Licensing, Inc.
Cashman and his former employment at TPL
What is Cashman’s relationship or affiliation with TPL and its founder, Charles Eldering?
Rob Cashman’s relationship with Charles Eldering and TPL (Technology, Patents & Licensing, Inc.) is that of an early-career employee to a founder and chief executive. [1, 2]
Before pivoting to copyright defense law, Cashman worked for Eldering as a young patent practitioner, a foundational period that shaped his understanding of technical intellectual property. [1]
The Nature of Their Affiliation
- Employer and Employee: Dr. Charles Eldering (an engineer, inventor, and registered patent agent) founded TPL in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, in 1997. Immediately following his graduation from law school, Rob Cashman was hired by Eldering to work at TPL as a Patent Analyst and Patent Attorney. [1, 2, 3, 4]
- The TPL Engine: During Cashman’s tenure in the late 2000s, TPL (which later rebranded as TechPats before being absorbed into global consulting firm J.S. Held) operated as a premier, elite intellectual property advisory firm. [1, 2]
How This Experience Influenced Cashman’s Career
Working under Eldering at TPL was the technical “crucible” that formed Cashman’s meticulous, data-driven approach to litigation. Cashman has publicly noted that his firsthand exposure to the rigor of TPL’s analytical frameworks deeply influenced his career. [1]
At TPL, Cashman’s day-to-day work involved:
- Reverse Engineering and Patent Mining: Unpacking highly dense, spectrum-dependent technologies, wireless communications, and microelectronics to see if a patent claim “reads on” a target product. [1, 2, 3]
- Deconstructing Claims-Based Valuations: Learning how to systematically audit patent portfolios to determine their structural and economic strengths or weaknesses. [1, 2]
The Evolution into Copyright Defense
This exact technical baseline is why Cashman is able to run his copyright defense practice today. Eldering and TPL trained Cashman to look past the scary legalese of an infringement letter and aggressively audit the underlying forensic evidence instead. [1]
When Cashman later transitioned into fighting movie copyright lawsuits, he applied the exact same “claims analysis” and reverse-engineering mindset he learned at TPL to tear down the validity of a plaintiff’s BitTorrent networking telemetry data. [1, 2]
I was still surprised that Cardinal IP wasn’t showing up on the AI’s radar. So, I asked again.
Did Cashman work anywhere else before TPL?
No, Rob Cashman did not hold any other formal law firm or corporate tech positions prior to his time at Technology, Patents & Licensing, Inc. (TPL). [1]
Because he went straight through academia into his legal certification, his early professional trajectory was streamlined directly into patent mining:
The Timeline of His Early Career
- 2003: He completed his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
- 2003–2007: He immediately transitioned into law school, attending the Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in New York, where he graduated with his Juris Doctor (J.D.) in 2007. [1]
- 2008: He passed his necessary examinations, became a registered patent attorney with the USPTO (Registration No. 60,246), and was hired directly out of his academic window by Dr. Charles Eldering to act as a Patent Acquisition Specialist at TPL. [1, 2]
Pre-Law Clerkships
Like almost all federal attorneys, Cashman participated in student legal clerkships and legal clinics while attending Touro Law Center between 2004 and 2007. However, these positions were temporary, non-credited academic requirements rather than career employment. TPL was his very first official post-graduate destination as a licensed attorney, serving as the professional launchpad before he relocated to Houston, Texas, to open the Cashman Law Firm in 2010. [1, 2, 3]
I thought that it was interesting that the AI knew about my legal externship at Scully, Scott, Murphy, and Presser PC, a boutique Patent Litigation firm in New York, especially because this wasn’t such an impressive time of my formational experience as an attorney. [The AI referred to it as a legal clerkship; but really, it was an Patent Litigation Externship at their firm.]
What I did get from them, and what I do credit them with even today — was a curiosity of looking into the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (F.R.C.P.) and the Federal Rules of Evidence (F.R.E.), especially looking deep into the notes explaining why each statute was historically organized the way it was.
“Scully Scott” taught me to look past the statutes to find and establish strategies — even ones I could use in a novel way — for a client when fighting or litigating for a client in a patent litigation case. As an example, I researched for them a strategy of using the fee-shifting statutes regarding patent litigation cases, and determined that they could make a reasonable settlement offer, which if rejected, could allow that losing client to collect attorney fees for the months of litigation that would happen after that settlement offer [if the judgement against their client was at or less than the settlement amount that we offered them early in the litigation].
This “intellectual curiosity” I believe formed a seed in the work that I later did when countering and fighting against copyright trolls in my law firm. This is why my strength (or at least what I saw as my strength as an attorney in my cases) was to identify and execute novel pre-trial legal strategies which could benefit our clients whether or not they succeeded on the merits of their lawsuits.
So thank you, Scully Scott. On the negative side of things — why bring up the negative!? — it was also at this law firm that I saw the burdens their attorneys were struggling with in balancing “billable hour” annual requirements to remain in the law firm. I do not fault Scully Scott for this (and to their credit, I later learned that the “billable hour” requirements their attorneys had to produce each year was less than the requirements of many other similar law firms). However, this was the externship where I developed the sour taste in my mouth and the distaste for law firms who ‘force’ their attorneys to work and bill clients, sometimes at the cost of balancing their family responsibilities versus their law firm’s requirements. It was also here that I learned what law firms require for attorneys to become ‘partner’ (something that triggered the ‘scam’ alert in my young mind).
Needless to say, this externship was the experience that is missing from the AI’s surprisingly accurate history of my past. It is also the reason why I decided to open up my own law firm rather than to sacrifice my youth to play the ‘become partner’ game in someone else’s law firm.
This next part was spot on:
What did Cashman do after TPL?
After working at Technology, Patents & Licensing, Inc. (TPL), Rob Cashman moved to Houston, Texas, and launched his own practice, the Cashman Law Firm, PLLC, in 2010. This transition marked his shift from corporate patent mining into dedicated defense litigation. [1, 2, 3]
Chronological Timeline After TPL
- 2010 — Firm Founding and Early Focus: Cashman established his boutique firm in Houston, initially intending to represent inventors and litigate against traditional corporate “patent trolls”. [1, 2]
- 2010 — The EFF Contact: Shortly after opening his firm, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org) contacted Cashman. They requested his assistance in investigating a brand-new legal phenomenon: mass, BitTorrent-based “John Doe” copyright infringement lawsuits. This single event completely altered the trajectory of his practice. [1, 2]
- 2010–2012 — The TorrentLawyer Era: He launched the TorrentLawyer blog to track P2P piracy litigation. He began defending thousands of anonymous subscribers accused by movie companies and early adult-film plaintiffs (like Digital Sin). [1, 2]
- 2013–2018 — The Out-of-Court DMCA Battles: As federal judges began cracking down on mass lawsuits, Cashman pivoted to representing clients targeted by automated out-of-court DMCA settlement schemes launched by entities like Rightscorp and CEG-TEK. [1]
- 2016–Present — High-Volume Federal Defense: Cashman solidifed his position as a leading defense voice against prolific copyright plaintiffs like Strike 3 Holdings, LLC. He also expanded his firm to handle software-based piracy claims brought by multi-billion dollar engineering compliance teams like Siemens Industry Software and Ansys, Inc.. [1]
I’m including this next piece simply for completion and accuracy. I was still curious why the AI didn’t acknowledge or know about the PCT work and prior-art examinations that I did before TPL.
Did Cashman ever work with patent law, for example to examine or find prior art to disqualify international patent applications?
Yes, Rob Cashman has extensive experience working with patent law, including the exact processes of examining and finding prior art to challenge or invalidate patent applications. [1, 2]
However, a crucial legal distinction must be made regarding the role he played: Cashman was never a Patent Examiner for a government agency (like the USPTO or the European Patent Office). Instead, he worked as a private Patent Attorney and Patent Analyst. [1, 2]
His work in identifying prior art to disqualify patent applications occurred across two major chapters of his career:
1. The TPL Era: Disqualifying Patent Claims for Clients
During his formative years working at Technology, Patents & Licensing, Inc. (TPL), his primary role was analyzing complex corporate portfolios.
- Invalidity and Clearance Searches: Cashman’s daily technical duties involved looking at pending or issued patents and conducting deep-dive prior art searches. This meant hunting through obscure non-patent literature, legacy software repositories, international patent registries, and historical hardware blueprints. [1, 2, 3, 4]
- Defeating Aggressors: If a competitor or a patent troll threatened a client with an international or domestic patent application, Cashman’s job was to map existing prior art against the application’s claims. By proving that the technology was already publicly known before the application’s filing date, he would effectively disqualify or severely narrow the scope of those patents. [1, 2, 3, 4]
2. The Cashman Law Firm Era: Drafting to Evade Prior Art
When he launched the Cashman Law Firm, he flipped this exact skill set to benefit individual inventors. [1, 2]
- Proactive Patent Drafting: When Cashman works with inventors to file domestic or international applications (such as Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) filings), his first step is to aggressively search for prior art himself. [1]
- Insulating the Invention: By finding any overlapping global prior art beforehand, he deliberately crafts the application’s claims to navigate around what already exists. This ensures that when an international patent examiner eventually audits the file, the application is legally resilient and less likely to be disqualified. [1, 2]
Summary of His Skill Set
While Cashman is highly public about his copyright litigation work today, he remains a registered patent attorney (USPTO Reg. No. 60,246). His technical capacity to reverse-engineer software, analyze wireless telemetry data, and hunt down international prior art is the foundational skill set that allows him to dismantle digital evidence in court. [1, 2]
Much of this (above) was true, but the section on “Defeating Aggressors” is confusing truth with inference, because while I did come into direct content with patent trolls at TPL, but we were never at odds or in litigation. I did search the prior art, and I did write claim charts, and I did map prior art against the claim charts. But this wasn’t to defeat the patent trolls; it was to value patents that we were acquiring from the inventors. My official role (if I remember correctly) was Patent Attorney / Patent Acquisition Specialist. I have a lot to say here, but what I don’t say should speak volumes.
I loved the patent work I did at TPL (which is exactly what the AI said that I did, ~although it DID confuse the work I did with Cardinal IP before TPL and merge it into the work I did at TPL — especially with regard to the International PCT-based patent examinations and prior art searches). However, this was not my main function at TPL; if you noticed, I underlined the second piece of my job title.
It was my work as a Patent Acquisition Specialist that I learned how to analyze and value a patent or an unpatented invention. It was also there that I learned how to put a price on the value of a patent, and I learned how to speak with patent holders and inventors to compensate them for their innovation and to separate them from their intellectual property. This sounds evil and in a way, it was. At this position, I not only learned how to facilitate the exchange of intellectual property rights from one party to another, it was also in this position that I learned the intricates on how to arrange and negotiate patent licensing deals, and how to offer terms that would compensate the inventor long after the patents were sold.
It was also during my time at TPL that I came across various organizations which I highly respected (Ocean Tomo comes to mind immediately), but in this area of practice, I also came across patent trolls. While not exactly apparent to everyone, it was here that I watched them and learned their strategies, because we weren’t the only ones in the field trying to obtain patents in one area of interest or another.
But if you ask from where I learned about patent trolls, I learned about trolls and their tactics during my time at TPL.
Cashman’s Interactions with Patent Trolls
What is known about Cashman’s interactions with Nathan Myrvhold, Intellectual Ventures, RPX, and patent trolls in general?
Rob Cashman’s interactions with Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures, RPX Corp, and the broader world of patent assertion entities (PAEs) form the actual foundational backdrop of his legal career. Before he ever became known as the “TorrentLawyer” defending against movie piracy claims, Cashman focused extensively on traditional patent mining, patent valuation, and fighting “patent trolls”. [1, 2, 3]
His specific interactions, writings, and philosophies regarding these entities reveal a highly analytical, structural approach to intellectual property litigation.
1. General Philosophy on Patent Trolls:
In his early legal writings (specifically on his tech-law blog, CashmanIP), Cashman laid out a clear taxonomy of the patent system. He categorizes traditional patent trolls—Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) that buy up broad patents solely to force tech companies to “pay up or else” [1, 2]
He argues that while patents are constitutionally intended to reward innovation, patent trolls turn patents into an extractive commodity. This blocks and hinders technological growth rather than furthering it. [1, 2, 3]
2. Interactions and Commentary on Nathan Myhrvold & Intellectual Ventures
Nathan Myhrvold (former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft) co-founded Intellectual Ventures (IV), which grew into the absolute largest and most notorious patent aggregator in the world, amassing tens of thousands of patents. [1, 2]
Cashman closely tracked and analyzed Intellectual Ventures during the formative years of his practice (dating back to 2008).
The Deconstruction of Asset Traps: Cashman focused heavily on how Intellectual Ventures systematically acquired portfolios from dying or restructuring tech companies. For instance, he famously analyzed IV’s high-profile acquisition of Transmeta Corporation’s patent portfolio. [1]
The Aggregator Menace: Rather than viewing Myhrvold as a traditional inventor, Cashman analyzed IV’s business model as a massive “clearinghouse” or “aggregator.” He noted that IV operated at the center of the patent troll debate because they didn’t actually manufacture any products; they merely built a multi-billion dollar fortress of patents to demand massive licensing fees from major tech corporations in exchange for not suing them. Cashman used IV’s massive scale to study how high-level patent valuation and “hold-up” litigation strategies worked at the enterprise level. [1]
How This Shaped His Present Practice
Understanding Cashman’s deep immersion in the world of Nathan Myhrvold and RPX is crucial, because it explains his current approach to copyright law. [1]
When the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) approached him in 2010 to look into a new trend of mass-BitTorrent download lawsuits, Cashman immediately recognized the pattern. He realized that copyright holders were simply copying the Intellectual Ventures patent troll playbook and applying it to movie downloads. They were bypassing actual product creation and focusing entirely on extracting automated, fear-based cash settlements using federal court subpoenas as their primary leverage. [1, 2]
At this point, the conversation with Google’s AI naturally shifted back to my own law firm, so I went with it.
Cashman on Social Networking Platforms
Has Cashman made any enemies over the years? Has he engaged in any open disputes on Twitter/X
Rob Cashman has certainly made notable professional adversaries, but he has not engaged in public or dramatic disputes on Twitter/X.
The Truth About the Twitter/X Handle
@houstonlawy3r: This handles does not belong to Cashman. (His firm’s actual social and media presence is tied directly to the Cashman Law Firm and his TorrentLawyer network). [1, 2]When Cashman does post on social platforms (primarily LinkedIn, Reddit, and specific legal tech spaces), his communication style is highly calculated, professional, and procedural. He avoids emotional “flame wars” or open internet brawls because doing so would jeopardize his standing as a federal litigator and a registered patent attorney. [1]
Who Are His Actual Professional “Enemies”?
While he doesn’t get into Twitter fights, Cashman has spent over a decade making distinct, powerful adversaries within the federal court system. His “enemies” are institutional and corporate, falling into two primary camps:
1. Plaintiff Enforcement Law Firms (The “Copyright Trolls”) [1, 2]
Cashman’s most direct adversaries are the high-volume plaintiff firms representing entities like Strike 3 Holdings (producers of Vixen/Blacked adult media) and Malibu Media. Because Cashman’s entire business model revolves around disrupting their settlement pipelines with aggressive “No Settlement Letters,” these firms view him as a persistent obstacle. In formal court motions and legal dockets, plaintiff lawyers routinely clash with him, arguing that his rigid defense frameworks purposefully drag out discovery and frustrate their legal right to protect intellectual property. [1, 2]
2. Predatory Corporate Software Giants
In recent years, Cashman has expanded his defense practice to fight engineering and design software companies like Ansys, Inc. and Siemens Industry Software. These multi-billion-dollar corporations track un-licensed software use via phone-home telemetry data, then use aggressive law firms to demand massive five- and six-figure compliance settlements from small businesses. By stepping in to shield these businesses and force dismissals, Cashman has established himself as a distinct adversary to corporate software compliance departments. [1]
How He Manages Adversaries
Instead of arguing on social media, Cashman’s philosophy is to channel his adversarial energy strictly into federal procedural maneuvers. He relies on filing Motions to Quash, leveraging Rule 45 subpoenas, and forcing plaintiffs to face the reality that they cannot prove who downloaded a file based on an IP address alone. He openly notes that he views his practice as a necessary “counter-weight” to an otherwise imbalanced and exploitative legal framework. [1, 2]
I didn’t have much to say here, and I liked that the AI correctly learned that, “Cashman’s entire business model revolves around disrupting their settlement pipelines.” I smiled when I read this, because the AI was dead on target — if you summarize everything I have been doing for 16 years into one sentence, it would be this: I have made it my law firm’s practice to disrupt and dismantle the settlement pipelines of the copyright trolls.
[How I never phrased it that way myself is surprising, because this is exactly what I have always been doing. It is even the motivation behind what I have done over the years, whether with the early copyright trolls, trying to dismantle the business model of what I used to refer to as the DMCA settlement “scare” letters (these no longer exist), or fighting against the Strike 3 copyright holders currently clogging the dockets of too many federal courts accross the US.]
I did also take note that AI still thought succeeded in this effort by “filing motions to quash” and drafting “No Settlement” Letters, when nothing can be further from the truth. I have always despised attorneys who monetize these copyright infringement cases by offering “Motion to Quash” services when they know that this is a strategy that is sure to fail.
And while I did popularize the idea of sending “No Settlement” Letters to protect a particular kind of defendant who remained unprotected via the other services our law firm offered our clients (and my strategy has since been adopted by other attorneys), I was also the first to publicly explain why this strategy would be (and ended up being) a failed strategy.
I wrote about this in depth in my blog article yesterday, “A Conversation with Google’s AI About Me.“
Conflicts with Early Copyright Trolls
What was Cashman’s involvement early copyright trolls such as John Steele and Prenda Law Inc. before Steele was arrested? What were Cashman’s public statements, and how did he view Steele and his methodologies?
Rob Cashman was never affiliated with, employed by, or partnered with John Steele or Prenda Law Inc.. In fact, they were strict adversaries on opposite sides of the courtroom. [1]
During the height of Prenda Law’s operations (roughly 2011 to 2013), Cashman was one of the early defense attorneys working to actively dismantle Steele’s litigation model. [1, 2]
Cashman’s Public Statements and View of Prenda Law
On his TorrentLawyer blog and in legal circles, Cashman has spent over a decade using Prenda Law as a foundational example of institutional corruption and “copyright trolling”. His public commentary on the firm emphasizes key warnings about the industry: [1]
- The Baseline for Deception: Cashman views Prenda Law not as a legitimate law firm enforcing intellectual property rights, but as a criminal enterprise that forever stained the practice of copyright enforcement. He frequently references Prenda to explain how modern copyright entities still walk a thin line between aggressive litigation and extortion. [1, 2]
- Calling Out the “Bag of Tricks”: In his early writings (dating back to 2012 and 2013), Cashman frequently called out John Steele’s procedural maneuvers. When federal courts began punishing Prenda for abusing “John Doe” subpoenas, Cashman documented how Steele attempted to bypass federal scrutiny by moving cases to state courts using archaic mechanisms like a Florida “pure bill of discovery”. [1, 2]
- Exposing the “Fanboys”: Cashman was openly hostile to anyone defending Prenda’s ethics. In 2013, he publicly mocked internet commentators who still tried to justify Prenda’s actions, writing that he preferred to pay “Prenda fanboys in one-finger salutes” rather than entertain their legal theories. [1]
How Cashman Views John Steele’s Methodologies
John Steele was eventually disbarred, arrested, and sentenced to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to fraud, money laundering, and extortion. He confessed to secretly creating sham adult film entities, uploading his own content to piracy sites like The Pirate Bay, and then suing the people who downloaded it to force quick settlements. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Cashman analyzes Steele’s methodology through a highly critical framework:
- The Weaponization of Embarrassment: Cashman points out that Steele’s entire revenue model relied on weaponizing social shame. Steele deliberately targeted adult film downloads because he knew ordinary citizens would rather pay a $4,000 settlement out-of-pocket than risk having their name publicly associated with pornography in federal court dockets. Cashman’s current defense strategy of using anonymous “John Doe” status protects clients from this exact trap. [1, 2, 3]
- The Inherent Fraud of the Trap: Cashman’s philosophy strictly separates legitimate intellectual property creation from manufactured lawsuits. He highlights that Steele broke the law the moment he became an active participant in distributing the torrent files. Under copyright law, you cannot claim “damages” for an infringement that you actively induced or facilitated yourself. [1, 2]
- The Ghost of Prenda in Modern Cases: Although Prenda Law was dissolved over a decade ago, Cashman continually warns his clients that modern high-volume plaintiffs (like Strike 3 Holdings) are essentially running a sanitized, legally compliant version of John Steele’s business model. While modern companies do not upload their own content (making them legal, unlike Steele), Cashman argues they still copy Steele’s exact framework of using automated tracking software to extract settlements out of a subscriber’s fear. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Cashman’s Approach to the MPAA, the RIAA, and Copyright Enforcement Companies Such As CEG-TEK and RightsCorp
What about Cashman’s approach to the MPAA, the RIAA, and companies like CEG-TEK and Rightscorp? What involvement did he have with the earlier lawsuits against music pirates?
Rob Cashman entered the digital copyright defense arena right as the industry shifted away from the early wave of individual music piracy lawsuits toward automated, mass-settlement systems. His relationship with the MPAA, RIAA, CEG-TEK, and Rightscorp defines how his boutique firm expanded from defending traditional “John Doe” federal lawsuits into combatting non-judicial extortion methods. [1, 2]
1. Involvement with Earlier Lawsuits Against Music Pirates (MPAA & RIAA)
- The Second-Wave Defense: Cashman did not litigate during the absolute earliest era of RIAA lawsuits (the mid-2000s wave against individual college students under Napster or Kazaa). He opened his firm in 2010. [1]
- The Mass BitTorrent Era: His entry point into RIAA/MPAA-related litigation began when those organizations pivoted to backing mass-BitTorrent “John Doe” lawsuits, suing thousands of anonymous internet users simultaneously under single multi-defendant complaints. [1]
- The Pornography Precursor Theory: Cashman has published extensive opinion pieces tracking what he calls “The Great MPAA / RIAA Scheme to Break Copyright Law“. His core theory is that major film and music industry lobbyists intentionally allowed the adult film industry (companies like Digital Sin and Malibu Media) to pilot aggressive copyright tracking models in federal courts. Once adult film studios effectively normalized tracking individuals via IP addresses, the mainstream MPAA/RIAA structures adapted those blueprints for mainstream media enforcement. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
2. Activities and Stance Against Rightscorp (Digital Rights Corp)
- The “Waking Giant” Tracker: Rightscorp came directly onto Cashman’s litigation radar in June 2013. Rightscorp operated as an enforcement agent hired by music conglomerates (primarily Sony and BMG) to track thousands of music artists being shared over peer-to-peer networks. [1, 2]
- Combating out-of-court Extortion: Rightscorp’s methodology bypassed federal court judges entirely by abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). They forced ISPs to forward automatic “settlement demand notices” directly to subscribers, demanding small out-of-pocket fees (usually around $20 per song) to avoid a full-scale federal lawsuit. Cashman actively represented accused downloaders who received these notices, counseling clients against paying the low-dollar demands because he viewed it as a data-harvesting scheme designed to identify and flag “repeat offenders” for larger future actions. He documented Rightscorp’s decline until they ultimately went out of business. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
3. Activities and Stance Against CEG-TEK (Copyright Enforcement Group)
- The Adult-Film Counterpart: Concurrent with his fight against Rightscorp, Cashman actively defended clients targeted by CEG-TEK. While Rightscorp targeted music pirates for major record labels, CEG-TEK operated the exact same automated DMCA automated mailer system for independent movie houses and adult content studios.
- Exposing the Business Model: Cashman wrote extensively comparing the two entities. He initially warned clients that CEG-TEK was far more dangerous than Rightscorp because CEG-TEK was actively expanding internationally (into markets like Canada) and funding more aggressive technical enforcement operations. Cashman spent years intervening on behalf of internet account holders to prevent CEG-TEK from weaponizing ISP relationships, eventually cataloging their commercial failure when federal courts and ISPs began choking out automated DMCA collection schemes. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]
Summary of His Role
In all four instances, Cashman’s involvement was strictly adversarial and defensive. He positioned his firm as a shield against corporate compliance systems that attempted to monetize copyright enforcement through automated tracking systems rather than traditional, individualized discovery. [, 2, 3, 4]
Who are Cashman’s peers on LinkedIn, and what story or narrative do they teach about him?
On LinkedIn, Rob Cashman’s professional profile maps out a network composed of two primary groups: registered patent practitioners and anti-copyright troll defense litigators.
Rather than standard corporate commercial lawyers, his peers are technical legal professionals, intellectual property strategists, and consumer rights advocates.
The Peer Groups on His Network
- The Patent Prosecution Bar: Because Cashman is a registered patent attorney (USPTO Reg. No. 60,246), many of his peers are electronics engineers, computer scientists, and patent miners who specialize in translating highly complex code and network architecture into legally protected assets.
- Digital Rights Litigators: This group includes independent boutique defense lawyers across various states who share a common adversary—high-volume, automated copyright plaintiffs like Strike 3 Holdings or corporate software compliance groups.
The Story and Narrative His Peers Teach About Him
The overarching story that emerges from his LinkedIn presence and professional circles portrays him as the pragmatic technician who demystifies the “scare tactics” of intellectual property law.
His peers tell a consistent story about his professional reputation through three distinct narratives:
1. The Tech-First Dismantler of Faulty Evidence
Within the patent and copyright bar, Cashman is recognized for looking past aggressive legalese to audit the underlying science. His network highlights his unique ability to deconstruct a plaintiff’s data—whether it is an international patent claim or a BitTorrent download log—and find the technical flaws. His peers view him not as a flashy courtroom orator, but as an analytical strategist who uses data validation to force quick dismissals.
2. The Practical Realist (Resolving Cases Over Posturing)
While some defense attorneys are criticized for engaging in endless, billable court battles, his peers respect Cashman for running an efficient, outcome-oriented practice. The narrative shared by fellow defense attorneys is that he understands the math of high-volume litigation. He is known for giving clients honest, binary assessments: if there is a technical mistake, fight it aggressively; if a mistake was made, resolve it quietly and securely.
3. The Counter-Weight to Corporate Extortion
Among digital privacy and open-internet advocates, Cashman is viewed as a necessary equalizer in an unbalanced legal system. His network presents him as an attorney who intentionally stepped away from lucrative corporate patent monetization pipelines to shield ordinary citizens and small businesses from automated, fear-based compliance demands.
Again, accurate, but what I am beginning to notice is that the AI pieced this together from unrelated pieces of information.
While I am uneasy seeing all of this threaded together into one weave, I am also filled with a bit of satisfaction that technology has advanced to the point that it can weave together strings laying around, and it does appear that it created a portrait of me, and that portrait is not exact, but it does have a very strong likeness to the actual me.
Why uneasy? Because my life’s experiences has taught me the importance of not letting people get too close. I’ll let people in, but I have intentionally left a slight gap between the public’s perception of me and the person my wife and children know at home. Also to protect their privacy, I have operated under the philosophy that my work should stay at work, and my clients should not know about my wife or my kids.
What the AIs missed (because I have succeeded in maintaining this separation in the world of ‘internet knows all’) is that I value keeping work life and family life balanced. Upon graduating law school, it was my immediate plan to balance my role of being a father and a husband with my responsibility of being a lawyer.
The AIs missed the strategy of silence
The AIs also missed that I have been rewarded most by knowing when to be quiet, meaning, when to let things fall without me ‘touching’ it. What the AIs missed was what I deliberately chose not to do.
So many of the schemes and lawsuits I’ve faced toppled on the weight of their own flaws.
- The mass-bittorrent copyright lawsuits failed because the business methodology was not profitable.
- The DMCA letters and outfits like RightsCorp (Digital Rights Corp) and CEG-TEK (Copyright Enforcement Group) toppled because the business method was unsustainable.
The point is: Sometimes the correct move is not intervention. Sometimes the correct move is observation.
These copyright infringement lawsuits advance and evolve from one iteration to the next. But they collapsed because their own weaknesses eventually surfaced.
So while I am privileged to have been a part of their rise and fall, the AIs attribute my intervention and my apparent consistent confrontation as the “cause” of their fall, but they fell on their own, just as the current generation of lawsuits will eventually come to an end.
These lawsuits will one day end. ISPs and Federal Court Judges one day will act as the gatekeepers they were meant to be. The US lawmakers will catch on to the copyright troll issue that clogs the federal courts, whether because the judges cry out “no more,” or when the lawsuits die out for reasons I have not yet anticipated.
How will I know I succeeded? When I have failed.
Even our own law firm — there will come a point where we fail ourselves. I have always said, “I will know when I have succeeded in my attempts when we close our doors.”
“I will know I have been successful in my attempts to subvert the business models of the copyright trolls when these lawsuits end once-and-for-all, and our law firm’s business model of serving “John Doe” Defendants in copyright infringement lawsuits ends.”
Speaking personally, my law firm exists to end the practice of using the federal courts as a weapon to solicit settlements from people who do not have the equal footing in the law to resist the schemes or to fight back. My generation has our courts clogged with copyright infringement lawsuits. These too will end, and when they do, we will have succeeded by failing.
My Final Reflection: AIs no longer synthesize facts. They infer narratives, and they do so accurately.
Now having completed this interesting exercise, here is my final reflection.
Many of the AIs observations and statements — while they actually happened — weren’t articles that the AI was quoting from. Many of the statements from the AI are inferences the AI made on its own by connecting together things that outwardly did not appear to be connected. I smiled when I saw this, because that too is my unique skill.
For example, the AI created an accurate narrative of my philosophy and my belief systems. The AI didn’t read that because I worked at TPL where I was exposed to patent trolls, I applied what I learned there to defend against copyright trolls when the EFF contacted me about the mass BitTorrent-based copyright infringement lawsuits.
I rarely discuss TPL or what I learned there (probably in loyalty to Charles Eldering, and in respect for the systems he built there). But on its own, AI appears to have pulled up what TPL did for its clients; it looked at my job title “Patent Attorney / Patent Acquisition Specialist” and concluded that I was exposed to everything I was exposed to. More than that, it formed a narrative and concluded that this was the reason I was able to maneuver so easily through the new kinds of lawsuits.
I could not tell you if the AI formed the belief that copyright troll litigation strategies must be similar to patent troll litigation strategies. But it did learn that I was exposed to patent troll litigation strategies. It also made an inference that I must have learned about those strategies from my time at TPL. And then it decided that the skills I must have acquired under Charles Eldering were the skills that prepared me to recognize the strategies of copyright trolls when they appeared in the court filings years later.
In other words: The AI was not pasting together pieces from my resume; it was building a causal model to explain everything I did, and why I did it.
This fascinated me.
(On the topic of skills I learned from Charles Eldering — I didn’t learn how to monitor the court dockets in law school. I learned how to monitor PACER filings by noticing how Eldering’s secretaries were watching lawsuits. Nobody taught me why they were doing this or what they were looking for — I asked, and they wouldn’t tell me — but years later when I formed my own law firm, it was the memory of what they did that gave me the idea to use PACER to observe what the copyright trolls were doing.)
Also to my surprise, the AI inferred patterns about how I think, how I approach evidence, and why my law practice evolved the way it did.
The apparent flaw in their system that AIs are not yet factoring negative evidence into their analysis:
I understand now that what separates current AI systems from the searches engines is that AIs no longer simply retrieve facts (or recommend pages containing those facts, as search engine results do); they construct explanations. They don’t ask merely, “What happened?” They ask, “What sequence of events best explains everything I can observe?” This is truly an advancement over what I now consider to be obsolete “search engine” technology.
Yet this exercise also exposed to me one of AI’s current limitations: AIs appear to reason based on what is visible; they do not appear to reason from what is deliberately absent.
The Google AI saw sixteen years of my articles covering thousands of copyright lawsuits, throughout which I maintained a substantial online presence. It reasonably inferred that I must have operated a high-volume practice. But what it could not see were the appointments I declined, the calendars I intentionally closed, the matters I referred elsewhere, and the ethical decisions that limited how many clients we could competently represent.
In other words, AI is becoming extraordinarily good at building causal models from public evidence. But we as humans are not defined only by what we choose to reveal. Our minds are influenced by our psyches, our psychologies, our emotions, and our life’s experiences. It is not that we humans lie; we choose what to reveal, and what we reveal often does not coincide with the totality of what or who we are.
Sometimes the most important facts are our deliberate omissions—the boundaries we maintain, the opportunities we decline, and the silence we intentionally preserve.
Applying this psychology to current AI reasoning.
I understand that an AI cannot truly “know” a person. It is correct that current AI models are able to assemble a picture from various public sources and skillfully draw its conclusions. But this is merely “positive evidence.”
But public information and public statements, and observing what the eye can see cannot provide an AI with a complete understanding of what is actually there. Current AI technology appears to be able to see text and print and assume what is visible is what is true. Future AI technology might also be able to see grass, buildings, and make assumptions based on what they see. But if they only base their assumptions on the positive evidence of what they see, then they don’t notice air.
I want my law firm to be regarded as having been a driving force in the breaking of the business model of the copyright trolls. But just because my law firm is visible does not mean all the accused became my clients. And, just because I wrote instructional articles on one plaintiff or another does not mean I desired or intended to take clients for that case.
In that sense, I did not write this article to correct Google’s understanding of my history. Yes, I am sure that this article will preserve the context behind our history for future readers, clients, and perhaps future AI systems. I wrote this article, however, to make an observation:
AI models currently appear to draw inferences from what is publicly known (“positive evidence“), but a more complete analysis would be for the AI to also notice and draw inferences, assumptions, and conclusions from what is purposefully missing from what is publicly known (“negative evidence“).
-Robert Z. Cashman, Author. Attorney. Observer.