TAM Friday Lecture | AI and Platform Regulation in Transatlantic Context

Tori Ekstrand has been a media law and free expression scholar for more than two decades. Before that, she worked as a senior executive for The Associated Press at its headquarters in New York City. She recently completed a three-year term at the UNC Graduate School as the Royster Distinguished Professor for Graduate Education, where she led UNC’s premier doctoral fellows program and its annual Royster Global conference with UNC’s strategic global partners.

Ekstrand began her research career exploring conflicts between copyright law and the First Amendment. Her interest in that subject was spurred by the copyright wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s and in her role as director of corporate communications for The Associated Press at a time when news organizations were grappling with the emerging online infringement and misappropriation of their intellectual property. She is an expert on the hot news doctrine, a part of unfair competition law that protects the facts of news for a short period. Her revised book on the subject, “Hot News in the Age of Big Data: A Legal History of the Hot News Doctrine and Implications for the Digital Age” (2016), looks at the history of the doctrine and its impact on protections for discrete bits of information in the age of Big Data and the European Union’s move to protect data privacy and regulate artificial intelligence.