Welcome back to Represent More, a podcast from We Are Them Media.
In Episode 2, hosts Ryan Clarkson and Shireen Clarkson dive into two of the most consequential — and underreported — legal battlegrounds of our time: the fight over who actually owns the content that built the AI revolution, and the slow-moving public health crisis hiding in your water bottle, your food containers, and your bloodstream.
Fresh off their annual Clarkson law firm partner retreat in Ojai, Ryan and Shireen get into it, covering:
- The landmark copyright class certification hearing against Google in the Northern District of California — and what’s at stake for authors, illustrators, and the entire creative community
- How Big Tech scraped the entire internet — billions of copyrighted works — to fuel AI tools worth trillions in market cap, without consent, compensation, or credit
- A plain-language breakdown of class certification: what it is, why corporations fight it so hard, and what it means when a court says yes
- The quiet danger of boilerplate user agreements — how mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers let corporations bury misconduct and dodge accountability
- Microplastics and forever chemicals: the science, the health risks (cancer, endocrine disruption, chronic inflammation), and why the legal system has been slow to respond
- What you can actually do right now to reduce your plastic exposure — from ditching the microwave to understanding what “BPA-free” and “recyclable” labels really mean
- Why plastics litigation could become the next wave of major public health litigation — following the same arc as Big Tobacco
The through line tying it all together? The same one that runs through every episode of Represent More: Corporations are privatizing profits and socializing harms. Whether it’s AI companies building trillion-dollar empires on stolen creative work, or plastic manufacturers hiding what they know about chemical exposure — the pattern holds.
And if the legislature won’t move and the executive branch won’t act, it falls to the courts — and to plaintiffs and lawyers willing to bring the fight.
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