On September 24, 2026, Jamison Gilmore of Weinberg Gonser LLP joined a panel of industry practitioners for “No Cheat Codes: Navigating Modern Video Game Deals, Distribution, and Disputes,” a CLE program on the modern video game business. Drawing on Weinberg Gonser’s trial experience in entertainment, licensing, trade secret, copyright, and trademark disputes, Jamison offered a litigator’s view of the risks that arise when deals and products end up in court. The discussion centered on two areas where Weinberg Gonser regularly advises clients: enforcing injunctions against parties who test their limits, and protecting trade secrets and privilege as AI tools enter legal and development workflows.
Jamison was joined by moderator Keith Cooper of Cooper & Iravani, LLP, who addressed development, financing, and monetization, Felix Hilgert of Osborne Clarke, who covered platform models such as Roblox and Fortnite/UEFN, Ryan Garfat of Pangea Entertainment Productions, who discussed esports, and Anastasiia (Stacey) Chuvaieva of Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP, who addressed regulatory developments involving platform control, online safety, and AI.
Injunction Enforcement and the “Spirit of the Injunction”
Jamison used Epic Games v. Apple to illustrate how courts respond when an enjoined party honors the words of an order while defeating its purpose. After a 2021 trial, the court barred Apple from prohibiting developers from directing customers to outside purchasing options. Apple responded with a 27% commission on linked-out purchases, applied for seven days after a user left the app, along with full-page warning screens, static URLs, and tight limits on buttons and calls to action. Internal documents showed Apple modeled the precise amount of friction needed to make external links unviable.
In April 2025, the district court held Apple in willful civil contempt and referred the matter to federal prosecutors to consider criminal contempt. The court applied the settled rule that a party breaches a decree by violating “the spirit of the injunction . . . .” In December 2025, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the contempt finding, warning that “narrow literalism” would allow injunctions to “spring loopholes.” The panel also reversed the permanent ban on all commissions as punitive because Apple had no way to purge its contempt, a reminder that civil contempt remedies must coerce compliance or compensate for loss. The Supreme Court has since granted certiorari on a limited question.
These are issues the litigation team at Weinberg Gonser have confronted recently. In Desireous Parties Unlimited, Inc. v. Right Connection, Inc., et al., in the Nevada District Court, the firm secured a preliminary injunction for its client. When the enjoined parties tested its boundaries, the firm successfully moved for sanctions twice and ultimately (recently) obtained a jury verdict. Drawing on that experience, Jamison noted that enjoined parties frequently search for the narrowest reading that preserves their business model. In the game industry, that risk is heightened because products update continuously, monetization can be reconfigured overnight, and platform rules can change without notice. It is recommended that clients seeking injunctive relief:
- Tie the order’s operative language to findings that explain its purpose.
- Anticipate functional substitutes, including fee structures, design friction, and cosmetic redesigns.
- Build a record that a court can later use to measure compliance.
- Monitor compliance actively after the order issues and preserve contemporaneous evidence for prompt enforcement motions.
Trade Secrets and the AI Privilege Trap
Jamison next turned to trade secret protection, which carries enormous weight for Weinberg Gonser’s clients in the industry. Before launch, unreleased builds, design documents, source code, game mechanics, balance systems, monetization models, and development roadmaps are valuable precisely because they are not public. After launch, proprietary algorithms, live-operations strategies, and player data practices remain core competitive assets. Each depends on reasonable efforts to maintain secrecy.
A growing body of decisions on whether AI use waives privilege and work product protection:
- In United States v. Heppner, the Southern District of New York held that a defendant’s exchanges with a public AI platform were protected by neither attorney-client privilege nor work product. The platform’s privacy policy permitted collection, training, and disclosure to third parties, so the defendant had no reasonable expectation of confidentiality, and any privileged information he entered was waived.
- In the United Kingdom, the Upper Tribunal warned that uploading confidential documents to an open-source tool such as ChatGPT places that information in the public domain, breaching client confidentiality and waiving privilege.
- In Warner v. Gilbarco, Inc., the Eastern District of Michigan reasoned that AI programs are tools rather than persons, so their use alone did not waive work product.
- In Morgan v. V2X, Inc., the District of Colorado agreed on work product but ordered the plaintiff to identify the AI tool he used with confidential information. The court also amended the protective order to bar uploading confidential material to any AI platform unless the provider is contractually prohibited from training on or disclosing inputs and must delete them on request.
Jamison cautioned that the facts that defeat privilege in Heppner and the UK decision also describe a disclosure that can undermine the secrecy element of a trade secret claim. An engineer who pastes source code into a consumer chatbot, or an in-house lawyer who uploads a leaked design document to summarize it, may hand an adversary an argument that the company failed to protect its own secrets. Morgan shows that courts will police these risks through protective orders, and parties that ignore them invite discovery into their own tools. Weinberg Gonser advises clients to:
- Adopt a written AI use policy that limits confidential and pre-release material to enterprise tools with contractual no-training, no-retention, and deletion commitments.
- Route AI-assisted legal analysis through counsel and verify every AI-generated citation before filing.
- Negotiate AI-specific terms in protective orders, NDAs, and vendor and contractor agreements.
- Train employees, developers, and contractors on what information may never be entered into public AI tools.
Final Thoughts
It was made clear in the program that the recurring questions in the game business remain who owns the asset, who controls monetization and data, and who bears the risk when something goes wrong. Courts are signaling that neither clever compliance nor careless AI use will be excused. Weinberg Gonser helps clients prepare for both by drafting enforceable injunctive relief, pursuing enforcement when opponents test its limits, and building confidentiality and AI governance practices that protect privilege and trade secret status. The program’s core message was that the best protection comes from planning for these disputes before they begin, and Jamison’s firsthand experience litigating injunction enforcement and confidentiality issues offered a practical roadmap for companies and counsel navigating them.