Google $10m bid for bankrupt airline Spirit’s data trove hits further turbulence

Photo by Joe Ng on Unsplash

Google’s $10m bid for a portfolio of data and related software put being auctioned off as part of the bankruptcy of collapsed US airline Spirit has hit more turbulence after Software as a Service provider Springshot claimed ownership of some of the data on offer. 

Springshot Inc, a digital logistics platform, argues that some of the data Spirit is selling actually belongs to it, having been generated using its proprietary software, and that it can’t be included in the data for sale.  

It has filed a limited objection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, and is asking for any data created using its software to be removed from the datasets before Google can get hold of it. 

A Bloomberg Law story says Springshot points out that under a 2022 software agreement with Spirit, it retains ownership of specific operational data and digital logistics intellectual property produced using its software.  

Media reports suggest Springshot is worried about Google’s stated plans to use the Spirit data to train its own AI-driven platform targeting airlines wanting to optimise their operations, which would be a rival to  Springshot’s offering.  

Springshot’s objection follows one from the US-based Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), the trade body which represents Spirit cabin crew. The AFA objection filed in court says that the dataset being sold includes “decades of payroll, timekeeping, training, travel, and recruiting files, together with approximately 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts, 17,082,644 OneDrive items, 20,577,677 SharePoint items, and 500,000,000 Teams items.”  

Google has already committed to screening out consumer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by hiring a third-party screening agency; the AFA says it wants the same screening to protect its members. 

The AFA-CWA’s concern here is that AI tools are now so powerful that there is a distinct possibility with a dataset like Spirit’s that actual individuals can effectively be identified by comparing the different subsets of information in the files. 

Data and datasets are being increasingly recognised as key intangible assets which can have significant value, even when sold off as part of the bankruptcy procedures. Challenges like the AFA’s, over the anonymisation of data, and Springshot’s, over the ownership of the IP in data created using proprietary bought-in software will need to be fully addressed.  

Added to that is the issue of who owns the output of AI tools; AI itself cannot currently own IP in its creations, so anyone using AI to create anything, whether it be artistic works or datasets,  will have to find a way to solve the ownership challenge.