Legal Aspects of Deep Tech Projects: What Barbashyn Law Firm Told Our Startups About AI and Contracts

As part of the Legal Aspects of Deep Tech Projects course — run within Win-Win EDIH by Vacuum Deep Tech Acceleration — we invited the Barbashyn Law Firm team to hold two online lectures: on who actually owns what AI creates, and how to write contracts that do real work instead of just sitting in a folder “just in case.”

Who owns what AI creates

The session was led by Serhii Barbashyn — attorney, managing partner at Barbashyn Law Firm, president of the International Association for AI and Business (AIEI), and a SandBox expert on AI governance and IP. He walked through Ukrainian and international approaches to AI regulation and laid out a distinction every business should know: being allowed to use an AI tool’s output under its terms of service isn’t the same as owning the copyright to it.

A few points worth remembering:

rights to AI-generated output depend on the jurisdiction and how the result was created;
copyright protection usually comes down to how much creative input and control a person had over the result;
being allowed to use an AI tool’s output doesn’t automatically mean you own the copyright to it.

Contracts that actually protect you

The second lecture — on writing startup contracts without complex legal language — was led by Andrii Barbashyn, acting head of IT law at Barbashyn Law Firm, a USF expert, and a member of AIEI’s legal committee. He covered the basic contract stack every startup needs with clients, contractors, developers, and investors, and explained what NDAs, SLAs, and IP-transfer agreements are actually for.

The main practical takeaways for startups:

fix key agreements before starting a collaboration, not after a dispute comes up;
formalize rights to work results properly — especially code, design, and content from contractors;
AI use needs its own legal check on authorship, ownership, and liability before commercial use;
contracts should match the real shape of the collaboration, not a one-size-fits-all template.

Both lectures are part of the Legal Aspects of Deep Tech Projects course, which we run for startups and tech teams working in deep tech and AI. Thanks to Serhii and Andrii Barbashyn and the whole Barbashyn Law Firm team for the partnership — and for helping our teams work through legal questions at the stage when they’re still easiest to solve.

Based on reporting by PRAVO.UA.