Legal Eagle covers the legal issues with it:

youtu.be/XVjeYW6S8Mo?si=qdE-MT3S3LSbEfxw

The whole trial probably should never have happened. Star Fleet implicitly accepted Data’s self determination by accepting his application to the Academy. Plus, if Maddox thought positronic nets weren’t a giant leap in artificial consciousness, why would he be so interested in Data at all?

The legal issues overlap with some of the philosophical issues. There’s a long history of investigation into intelligence and consciousness, and none of it is on display in the episode. It’s not even a very good introduction to the topic.

This is rather important to today’s issues with AI. While I think current AI tech is vastly overhyped, some of the popular arguments against it are just bad.