Tagged / copyright

Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) celebrates 25th anniversary

The Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management (CIPPM) at Bournemouth University has celebrated its 25th anniversary.

The previous and current directors of CIPPM with Professor Einar Thorsen

From L-R: (Top) Prof. Martin Kretschmer. Prof. Einar Thorsen, Prof. Maurizio Borghi, (Bottom) Prof. Ruth Soetendorp and Prof. Dinusha Mendis

Established in 2000 by founding directors Professor Ruth Soetendorp and Professor Martin Kretschmer, CIPPM has since carried out over 50 research projects by around 100 members – informing intellectual property policy in the UK and internationally.

In 2018 the Centre was named as a Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence for European Intellectual Property and Information Rights, co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union.

Research and consultancy projects have covered topics including 3D printing and intellectual property law; copyright and the regulation of Orphan Works; and the music publishing industry.

CIPPM research commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office recommended the introduction of a parody exception to copyright, which was adopted by the UK government and has benefited the creative sector through increased income, innovation and freedom of expression.

To celebrate the anniversary, CIPPM hosted a two-day event, bringing together past and present members and collaborators to showcase the changing landscape of intellectual property and the work of the centre during the past 25 years.

Opening the event, Professor Einar Thorsen, Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communication, said: “[CIPPM’s] reach across BU and beyond is truly incredible.

“The centre rightly prides itself on its reputation of evidence-based research and interdisciplinarity, exemplified by strong links with other departments within our faculty.

“The work of the centre extends nationally and internationally. It is really impressive and we’re incredibly proud of it.”

Panel of former and current directors of CIPPM at 25th anniversary event

The former and current directors of CIPPM took part in a panel discussion

As part of the event, the past and current directors of CIPPM – Professor Martin Kretschmer (Founding Director, 2000-2012), Professor Ruth Soetendorp (Founding Director, 2000-2007), Professor Maurizio Borghi, (Director, 2013-2021) and Professor Dinusha Mendis (Director since 2022) – came together for a panel discussion to share their insights and experiences of being part of the centre.

Professor Kretschmer spoke of CIPPM’s unique approach of looking at the effects of IP law and its impact, working with businesses and companies of all shapes and sizes to help them understand what IP meant for them.

Professor Soetendorp described CIPPM as acting like a ‘marriage guidance counsellor’ – bringing together partners and helping them to understand each other.

Professor Borghi added that CIPPM brought together intellectual property enthusiasm and scepticism, adding that a critical view of the limits of IP was needed alongside a strong and solid knowledge of the field, while Professor Mendis spoke about the creative and collaborative approach taken by CIPPM, talking to people outside of IP law.

When asked what the biggest challenges in the next 10 years might be, the panel spoke about advances in technology such as AI, changes in geopolitics and foreign policy, and maintaining a balance of IP rights against other legal protections like trade secrets and confidentiality.

Attendees at the event were also asked to contribute to a time capsule, writing their predictions for the future of both the centre and intellectual property.

Professor Dinusha Mendis, current director of CIPPM, said: “CIPPM isn’t the biggest centre but the people we have – whether they are permanent staff or visiting fellows – have built a vibrant community.

“It’s not about the quantity but the quality of what we do. CIPPM members together have achieved a lot, and we can be really proud of that.”

Find out more about CIPPM

Conversation article: How a New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could potentially transform how AI and copyright work

Professor Dinusha Mendis writes for The Conversation about the potential copyright implications of AI as a lawsuit is lodged by the New York Times against the creator of ChatGPT…

How a New York Times copyright lawsuit against OpenAI could potentially transform how AI and copyright work

Stas Malyarevsky / Shutterstock

Dinusha Mendis, Bournemouth University

On December 27, 2023, the New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit in the Federal
District Court in Manhattan against Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT,
alleging that OpenAI had unlawfully used its articles to create artificial intelligence (AI) products.

Citing copyright infringement and the importance of independent journalism to democracy, the newspaper further alleged that even though the defendant, OpenAI, may have “engaged in wide scale copying from many sources, they gave Times content particular emphasis” in training generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT). This is the kind of technology that underlies products such as the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

The complaint by the New York Times states that OpenAI took millions of copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations, opinion pieces, reviews, how-to guides and more in an attempt to “free ride on the Times’s massive investment in its journalism”.

In a blog post published by OpenAI on January 8, 2024, the tech company responded to the allegations by emphasising its support of journalism and partnerships with news organisations. It went on to say that the “NYT lawsuit is without merit”.

In the months prior to the complaint being lodged by the New York Times, OpenAI had entered into agreements with large media companies such as Axel-Springer and the Associated Press, although notably, the Times failed to reach an agreement with the tech company.

The NYT case is important because it is different to other cases involving AI and copyright, such as the case brought by the online photo library Getty Images against the tech company Stability AI earlier in 2023. In this case, Getty Images alleged that Stability AI processed millions of copyrighted images using a tool called Stable Diffusion, which generates images from text prompts using AI.

The main difference between this case and the New York Times one is that the newspaper’s complaint highlighted actual outputs used by OpenAI to train its AI tools. The Times provided examples of articles that were reproduced almost verbatim.

Use of material

The defence available to OpenAI is “fair use” under the US Copyright Act 1976, section 107. This is because the unlicensed use of copyright material to train generative AI models can serve as a “transformative use” which changes the original material. However, the complaint from the New York Times also says that their chatbots bypassed the newspaper’s paywalls to create summaries of articles.

Even though summaries do not infringe copyright, their use could be used by the New York Times to try to demonstrate a negative commercial impact on the newspaper – challenging the fair use defence.

ChatGPT
Giulio Benzin / Shutterstock

This case could ultimately be settled out of court. It is also possible that the Times’ lawsuit was more a negotiating tactic than a real attempt to go all the way to trial. Whichever way the case proceeds, it could have important implications for both traditional media and AI development.

It also raises the question of the suitability of current copyright laws to deal with AI. In a submission to the House of Lords communications and digital select committee on December 5, 2023, OpenAI claimed that “it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without copyrighted materials”.

It went on to say that “limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens”.

Looking for answers

The EU’s AI Act –- the world’s first AI Act –- might give us insights into some future directions. Among its many articles, there are two provisions particularly relevant to copyright.

The first provision titled, “Obligations for providers of general-purpose AI
models” includes two distinct requirements related to copyright. Section 1(C)
requires providers of general-purpose AI models to put in place a policy to respect EU copyright law.

Section 1(d) requires providers of general purpose AI systems to draw up and make publicly available a detailed summary about content used for training AI systems.

While section 1(d) raises some questions, section 1(c) makes it clear that any use of copyright protected content requires the authorisation of the rights holder concerned unless relevant copyright exceptions apply. Where the rights to opt out has been expressly reserved in an appropriate manner, providers of general purpose AI models, such as OpenAI, will need to obtain authorisation from rights holders if they want to carry out text and data mining on their copyrighted works.

Even though the EU AI Act may not be directly relevant to the New York Times complaint against OpenAI, it illustrates the way in which copyright laws will be designed to deal with this fast-moving technology. In future, we are likely to see more media organisations adopting this law to protect journalism and creativity. In fact, even before the EU AI Act was passed, the New York Times blocked OpenAI from trawling its content. The Guardian followed suit in September 2023 – as did many others.

However, the move did not allow material to be removed from existing training
data sets. Therefore, any copyrighted material used by the training models up until then would have been used in OpenAI’s outputs –- which led to negotiations between the New York Times and OpenAI breaking down.

With laws such as those in the EU AI Act now placing legal obligations on general purpose AI models, their future could look more constrained in the way that they use copyrighted works to train and improve their systems. We can expect other jurisdictions to update their copyright laws reflecting similar provisions to that of the EU AI Act in an attempt to protect creativity. As for traditional media, ever since the rise of the internet and social media, news outlets have been challenged in drawing readers to their sites and generative AI has simply exacerbated this issue.

This case will not spell the end of generative AI or copyright. However, it certainly raises questions for the future of AI innovation and the protection of creative content. AI will certainly continue to grow and develop and we will continue to see and experience its many benefits. However, the time has come for policymakers to take serious note of these AI developments and update copyright laws, protecting creators in the process.The Conversation

Dinusha Mendis, Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation Law; Director Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Managament (CIPPM), Bournemouth University, Bournemouth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Understanding Creative Commons licences and copyright for your research outputs

Guidance, Research Ethics

Copyright and licensing are becoming more complex in the world of academic publishing.

Creative Commons licences are becoming increasingly more popular for Open Access works and are a requirement by several funding bodies. These licences allow authors to decide how their work (articles, conferences, monographs, data, artwork, for example) may be shared.

Many publishers, such as Elsevier, request a specific type of licence in their copyright paperwork (when a paper gets submitted), so it is important to be aware of the differences.

The good news is that your librarians can help. We have put together guidance on Creative Commons. In doubt, you can also contact your library team.

You might also like to have a look at these articles (1 and 2) about the complexities of copyright and self-archiving (i.e. submitting articles to BURO or other repositories). The author, Elizabeth Gadd, is an expert in this field. The conclusions from these studies are that most academics are happy to share their work and that copyright legislation and restrictions imposed by publishers are sometimes in excess of what researchers need.

Firms putting more of their assets under IP

innovation

business_law
UK industry is investing more than £70 billion a year in intangible assets covered by intellectual property rights, the national agency responsible for regulating patents and copyright has said.
In its booklet Fast Facts 2017, the Intellectual Property Office—the government agency formerly known as the Patent Office—reveals a steady growth in industry investment in IP rights. Companies spent £70bn on assets protected by IPR agreements in 2014, compared with £47 billion in 2000.

The booklet contains facts and figures which describe the intellectual property landscape and provides information on:

  • patents
  • trade marks
  • designs
  • copyright
  • enforcement
  • the IPO

Further information including a printable version of the Fast facts 2017 can be found here.

Fusion Investment fund 2014/15 – Making sense of DRM in game development (Madrigal)

The United Kingdom is Europe’s second largest video game market and the fifth largest in the world. Almost all videogames developers now implement techniques that are designed to protect and enforce copyright law. This restrictive technology is now beginning to hamper the ability of gaming companies to innovate by imposing platform boundaries and these measures now appear to also be problematic to the game development lifecycle. The roots of this complex problem are grounded in several disciplines including copyright law, cyber security, and creative technology. This restrictive technology can prevent you from copying certain CDs or DVDs to a portable device to watch during your train journey or even go as far as to dictate which brand of coffee capsules you put in your expresso machine.

This is Digital Rights Management (DRM).

The Madrigal project has been awarded a Fusion Investment Fund to investigate, identify and communicate how game developers make sense of DRM technology when developing video games. At present virtually no empirical research exists on how much videogame developers really know about the relationship between DRM and copyright law in terms of boundaries to DRM implementation, or on their real expectations from currently available DRM technology. Do they really understand it? Do they like it? Do they implement it regularly? Do they respect the boundaries? Is DRM legal? Other pressing issues that need addressing include, does DRM really stifle competition? After all the developers are protected by copyright law, but where do the issues with DRM really lie?

These questions surrounding the issue of DRM have gained more coverage recently thanks to the Apple trial. In which Apple was accused of anti-competitive behaviour because it refused to disclose its DRM to competitors. The collection of this entirely new data on the complexities of DRM will form part of the basis for a wider-reaching research project involving not only legal and IT scholars at BU but also international academic and industry partners. With its research expertise in copyright law innovation, usable security research, and game development, and its institutional drive for fusion across inter-disciplinary research, education, and professional practice, BU is uniquely situated to start tackling this problem.

If you would like further information on this research feel free to contact us or to tweet us. We look forward to any feedback. Also, if you are interested, keep tuned, as we will tell you what we learned from our experience at the end of the project (July 2015).

Dr. Marcella Favale (Principal Investigator) Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management, BU, mfavale@bournemouth.ac.uk, @MFavaleIP

Dr. Shamal Faily (sfaily@bournemouth.ac.uk) and Dr. Christos Gatzidis (cgatzidis@bournemouth.ac.uk), Faculty of Science and Technology, BU

Neil McDonald (Research Assistant ) BU Cyber Security Unit (BUCSU) @BUCybersecurity (nmcdonald@bournemouth.ac.uk)

Want to know how to publish a journal article and retain your rights? – International Open Access Week

Publishing

Then say hello to the SPARC Author Addendum – http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum

SPARC is The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.

Your article has been accepted for publication in a journal and, like your colleagues, you want it to have the widest possible distribution and impact in the scholarly community. In the past, this required print publication. Today you have other options, like online archiving, but the publication agreement you’ll likely encounter will actually prevent broad distribution of your work.

It is unlikely that you would knowingly keep your research from a readership that could benefit from it, but signing a restrictive publication agreement limits your scholarly universe and lessens your impact as an author.

Why? According to the traditional publication agreement, all rights —including copyright — go to the journal. You probably want to include sections of your article in later works. You might want to give copies to your class or distribute it among colleagues. And you are likely to want to place it on your staff profile page and in BU’s institutional repository (BURO, especially as this is now a requirement for the next REF exercise – see this post for further information). These are all ways to give your research wide exposure and fulfill your goals as a scholar, but they are inhibited by the traditional agreement. If you sign on the publisher’s dotted line, is there any way to retain these critical rights?

Yes. The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows you to keep key rights to your articles. The Author Addendum is a free resource developed by SPARC in partnership with Creative Commons and Science Commons, established non-profit organizations that offer a range of copyright options for many different creative endeavors.

Visit the SPARC website for further information – http://www.sparc.arl.org/resources/authors/addendum

Have you got any experience of using this to negotiate your rights as an author with publishers? Share your experiences by contributing to the Research Blog!