The Riddled Retainer

Class: Retained Counsel

Level: General Counsel of Fortune

Alignment: Lawful (Barely) Patronage

BIOGRAPHY

A credentialed figure from the legal professions who uses the same vocabulary used in a courtroom as a marketing funnel. In that funnel there is no opposing counsel to push back and no judge who has read the cases. The Retainer’s power is in the vestments. The footnotes. The Latin. The byline that reads “Counsel” in front of the pitch.

The office he claims — officer of the court, advisor to the law — existed once in cleaner form. The office he actually occupies is older than that one: a hired blade on retainer to a house that is paying him to speak. In proper feudal order, the counselor and the bravo were separate roles for a reason. In the Retainer, they are the same person. He advises in the forms of an officer while serving only the commerce of his patron. He is a cadet branch of the aristocracy — not himself a wielder of the core magic, but related by marriage to those who are, dining off the rents of their manufactured fear.

ATTRIBUTES

Stat	Score	Modifier
STR (Conviction)	16	+3
DEX (Nuance)	5	-3
CON (Consistency)	10	+0
INT (Technical Depth)	13	+1
WIS (Self-Awareness)	4	-3
CHA (Engagement Farming)	14	+2

ABILITIES

Vestments of the Bar (Passive) “Attorney,” “General Counsel,” and/or “IP” in the byline grants +3 to all authority saves. Lay readers have disadvantage on critique checks against statements emitted from within the vestments. Counterattacks by any other class are affected by IANAL (“I am not a lawyer”), reducing their effectiveness by 85%. Effect stacks with footnotes.

Pseudo-Term Coinage (1/article) Manufactures a legal-sounding term — “prohibition jurisdictions,” “the public-domain trap,” “simultaneous publication at t=0.” Deploys it in present tense, without scare quotes, without citation. The term acquires weight through repetition and footnote proximity. Saving throw: read a dictionary of legal terms. Good luck understanding it…

Citational Equalization (Passive) Places non-binding legislative resolutions in the same footnote register as binding appellate rulings. Places firm marketing writeups in the same format as primary authority. Saving Throw: Context awareness. Knowing that this is not a courtroom, matters when evaluating the veracity of Counsel’s citations.

Proprietary Exit (Core) The illusory realm the Vestments construct has exactly one gate, and the Retainer owns it. The methodology, the platform, the framework, the audit — the cure is proprietary because the disease was. Both were authored by the same hand. The demo is bookable. The funnel closes.

WEAKNESSES

Reading Comprehension (Basic) The ruling the Retainer invokes is short and plainly written. The judges wrote for humans on purpose. A non-lawyer can absorb the entire holding before the second cup of coffee. The Retainer’s business depends entirely on readers not opening the opinion. Open the opinion and the game is over.

The Stipulated Zero The case was decided on a stipulation almost no real work satisfies. The applicant told the Copyright Office that zero humans had made any creative contribution to the work. Under that stipulation, ownership could only fall to the AI itself — which cannot own or assign copyright, because it is not a human. This case was constructed as an appeal for AI personhood via the trojan horse of the copyright office; not as a nuanced ruling around human authorship in the AI era. Can a non-human hold a copyright? No. That is its entire reach. The court wanted this clear. The district court wrote that its review was “limited only to the question of whether a work generated entirely by an artificial system absent human involvement should be eligible for copyright.”

On appeal, the DC Circuit added that the human-authorship requirement “requires only that the author of that work be a human being — the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence — and not the machine itself.” The vast majority of AI-generated output in the wild involves human prompting, selection, editing, and integration. None of it matches the stipulated, and largely manufactured corner-case of facts.

The Retainer applies the ruling to all AI generated materials anyway, counting on the reader neither to understand the stipulation nor to be able to unravel it from the broad misunderstanding that has grown around the case.

Further, the case is narrowly scoped to the specific situation in which a filing for copyright seeks for the copyright to belong to the AI itself, or to be re-assigned from the AI to a third party via work-for-hire. This is not what most anyone looking to understand their own AI generations wants to know. Most users of AI generation want assurance that they themselves own copyright for the work they prompted. The court makes sure to be clear, that this ruling DOES NOT apply to such a common scenario.

The Footnote Check Every footnote in the apparatus links to a firm writeup by a real practitioner. Every one of those writeups says something different from what the article claims. The Retainer counts on readers mistaking the presence of citations for the support of citations. Clicking breaks the spell.

The Missing Cases The novel theories — simultaneous global adjudication at publication, permanent public-domain status locked at t=0, “prohibition jurisdictions” — appear without a single supporting case citation. Not because the Retainer forgot. Because there are none.

The Muffling of the Guidance The US Copyright Office has published its own guidance on exactly this question — its January 2025 Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2 report — stating plainly that the use of AI to assist in creation does not bar copyrightability, and that human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient for authorship, analyzed case-by-case. The Retainer does not cite it. The Retainer does not mention it. It is the primary governmental authority on the question his article claims to answer, and it directly contradicts his thesis. So it is absent.

The Documentation Sleight This one is insidious. The diagnostic question — “have you documented human creative decisions at every phase?” — treats documentation as authorship. It is not. The deeper move underneath is worse. The Retainer presumes that absent explicit documentation, a court would default to treating the work as 100% AI-generated with zero human input. That is not precedent. No court has held it, and no court is likely to. It smuggles Thaler’s stipulated fact — no human involvement at all — back in as a presumption of the general case. There is no such presumption.

Building a system in which zero humans made creative contributions is itself difficult; ordinary AI-assisted development does not produce it. The Retainer has manufactured a default ruling where none exists or is likely to exist. The honest version of his advice is modest: “if you keep usage records, they may help in the unlikely event someone tries to steal your work and cite this case as precedent.” That version is evidentiary, uncommercial, and accurate. It does not sell a methodology. That is why it is not the version he gives you.

EQUIPMENT

The Credential Vestments — “Attorney | General Counsel | AI & IP” worn at the top of the byline. Grants passive authority before the first sentence is read. Cannot be removed during the article’s runtime.
The Footnote Apparatus — Numbered citations to real firms, real cases, real treaties. Rigorous in appearance. Tangential to argument in content. Applied liberally to inoculate against skepticism.
The Coined Term — Manufactured at will. Not a recognized term of art anywhere in the legal corpus. Disguised as one: deployed without scare quotes, in the cadence of established doctrine, to fool the lay reader into treating the coinage as canon.
The Proprietary Methodology — Branded product waiting at the end of the funnel. SDD, SDLC, XYZ Framework™. Booking link included.
The Pending Case — Cited as “coming soon” precedent, borrowing authority that does not yet exist. Were you his client, would he advise you to wait for the ruling?

SPECIMEN BEHAVIOR

The Retainer published a corporate blog post timed to the recent cert denial in a prominent AI-authorship case. The structure, stripped of ornament:

Opening assertion: AI-generated code is already public domain in the major economies, effective now and permanently.
Temporal framing: this has supposedly already happened — at the moment of repository commit, automatically, globally.
Invocation of the relevant appellate case as though it established a universal rule, when the case in fact turned on a stipulation the applicant himself made that no human had authored the work.
Invocation of a non-binding legislative resolution from another jurisdiction as though it carried the same weight as binding appellate precedent.
Coinage of a pseudo-legal term — “prohibition jurisdictions” — introduced without qualification, deployed repeatedly, allowed to accrete the gravity of established doctrine.
A novel doctrinal theory: simultaneous internet publication triggers simultaneous global adjudication, rendering the work unprotectable in every relevant jurisdiction at the same instant.
A constructed crisis: the reader’s codebase is already public domain in the reader’s clients’ primary markets.
A proprietary methodology presented as the only available remedy.
Closing call-to-action: book a demo.

The accompanying LinkedIn post is the hook — short, alarmed, written in compressed present tense. The article is the apparatus — footnotes, diagrams, a treaty citation, pending-case awareness, a neologism inserted as though it were a term of art. Hook and apparatus together constitute a funnel. The hook creates the anxiety. The apparatus authenticates it. The methodology resolves it.

ANALYSIS

The ruling the Retainer is riding rests on facts any literate adult can verify in an afternoon. Thaler v. Perlmutter is a short opinion. The Supreme Court declined to hear it on March 2, 2026; as of April 2026, the binding authority is the DC Circuit’s March 2025 affirmance, and that opinion is written plainly enough that a reader without a law degree can absorb the entire holding by the end of page three. This matters, because the Retainer’s business depends on you not bothering.

Thaler lost because Thaler stipulated. He told the Copyright Office that his Creativity Machine was the sole author. He went to great lengths to create a system that attempted to create such a situation where he did not prompt in any way. He told them no human had made any creative contribution. He asked the Office to honor that stipulation, declare the AI as the actual author and therefore, original owner of copyright. And only then, to transfer ownership to him through work-for-hire — a doctrine that operates between persons, not between a person and a machine.

The copyright office and the courts took him at his word, and denied the AI ownership. They said it in plain English. A dog cannot assign its copyright to you either. Neither can a spreadsheet, a coin toss, or a weather pattern. The rule is not mysterious. The rule is that the originating author must be a human being. And the question as to if the AI actually was the author, isn’t at issue. It’s stipulated that in this case, the human wasn’t involved in authorship.

The Circuit, knowing the rule would be invoked in cases nothing like Thaler’s, wrote as clearly as a sentence can be written. The human-authorship requirement, the court said, asks only that the author be a human — the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence. A developer who uses a model to produce code is exactly that person. A writer who uses AI to draft and then edits is exactly that person. The judges did not leave this to inference. They wrote it into the ruling because they understood the ruling would be confused at best and weaponized at worst. They wrote plainly on purpose, for a human audience, because the holding matters to humans.

The Retainer’s entire pitch requires you not to read it. And further, that you relinquish your right to understand intellectual property; and substitute his twisted disconnected readings. Mostly for fear of the complexity, the vestments and the hedge maze you are standing in.

He uses “AI-generated code” the way a magician uses sleight-of-hand — narrow when the legal claim needs it (pure machine output absent any human prompting whatsoever, so rare as to potentially be fictional), wide when his claim needs it (everything produced with any AI assistance). Watch the phrase across a single paragraph of his prose. It will refer to two different things at two different points. That slippage is the magic trick, and in a world full of magic, you’re far more likely to fall for it. Real legal documents start by defining terms…

Stripped of its vestments, the argument reduces to this: A court ruled that a machine cannot be an author, therefore your human-authored work that used a machine is in the public domain. Read it out loud. It does not survive contact with a six-year-old. The only reason it survives contact with a business audience is that the business audience has been trained to treat legal jargon as evidence of legal substance. The Retainer trades on that.

The rest of the apparatus works by the same method. An invented term of art — offered in present tense, without scare quotes, as though it were established doctrine — is established nowhere. A non-binding legislative resolution is cited in the same footnote register as a binding appellate opinion, allowing visual equivalence to substitute for doctrinal equivalence. A novel theory — that pushing code to a repository triggers a simultaneous, permanent, globe-spanning adjudication of copyright status — is offered without a single case supporting it, because there are none. The underlying treaty provision the theory invokes says the opposite: each country evaluates independently, when and if the question is actually presented there. None of this is hidden. All of it is visible to anyone who clicks the footnotes he provides and reads what is on the other side.

The structural move repeats. Find a real thing. Exaggerate its scope by an order of magnitude. Insert a coinage that sounds like law. Cite real authorities in configurations that make them appear to say something they do not.

Declare an emergency. Offer a proprietary methodology as the only exit.

The judges wrote plainly. They wrote plainly on purpose. They knew the ruling would be translated into crisis jargon by figures of this kind, and they wanted the primary text to remain legible to anyone who bothered to read it past the marketing. Anyone includes you. Anyone has always included you.

ENCOUNTER NOTES

Lessons: Old magic tricks somehow become more powerful in a world full of real magic. Because the presumption of the trick is itself suspect. Could it be real? The Retainer does not create real magic. He monetizes the fear of its legal consequences. His ward — the credential — is older than the Third Law, and it is powerful. It has always existed. However, the correct response is not deference to thuggery.