Keyword: Artificial intelligence
AI Music Outputs: Challenges to the Copyright Legal Framework download
Abstract
This report examines the application of EU copyright and related rights law to outputs generated by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, tools or techniques (AI outputs), with a focus on outputs in the musical domain. The Report examines the question: How can and should EU copyright and related rights law protect AI musical outputs? The interdisciplinary (legal and empirical) research involves: (i) analyzing of the protection of AI outputs under EU copyright and related rights law; (ii) examining the attribution of authorship and ownership to (natural and legal) persons involved in the creation or production of AI outputs; (iii) proposing interpretative guidelines and policy recommendations on increasing legal certainty regarding the protection, authorship, and ownership of copyright and related rights over AI outputs, especially music outputs.
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Artificial intelligence, computer-generated works, Copyright, EU, Intellectual property, music, originality, related rights
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The Algorithmic Learning Deficit: Artificial Intelligence, Data Protection and Trade external link
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algorithms, Artificial intelligence, frontpage, handelsrecht, Recht op gegevensbescherming
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Trademark Law, AI-driven Behavioral Advertising, and the Digital Services Act: Toward Source and Parameter Transparency for Consumers, Brand Owners and Competitors external link
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In its Proposal for a Digital Services Act (“DSA”), the European Commission highlighted the need for new transparency obligations to arrive at accountable digital services, ensure a fair environment for economic operators and empower consumers. However, the proposed new rules seem to focus on transparency measures for consumers. According to the DSA Proposal, platforms, such as online marketplaces, must ensure that platform users receive information enabling them to understand when and on whose behalf an advertisement is displayed, and which parameters are used to direct advertising to them, including explanations of the logic underlying systems for targeted advertising. Statements addressing the interests of trademark owners and trademark policy are sought in vain. Against this background, the analysis sheds light on AI-driven behavioural advertising practices and the policy considerations underlying the proposed new transparency obligations. In the light of the debate on trademark protection in keyword advertising cases, it will show that not only consumers but also trademark owners have a legitimate interest in receiving information on the parameters that are used to target consumers. The discussion will lead to the insight that lessons from the keyword advertising debate can play an important role in the transparency discourse because they broaden the spectrum of policy rationales and guidelines for new transparency rules. In addition to the current focus on consumer empowerment, the enhancement of information on alternative offers in the marketplace and the strengthening of trust in AI-driven, personalized advertising enter the picture. On balance, there are good reasons to broaden the scope of the DSA initiative and ensure access to transparency information for consumers and trademark owners alike.
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Artificial intelligence, Trademark law
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‘Voetbal Hoort niet bij Robots’: Attitudes Regarding the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Refereeing download
Governing “European values” inside data flows: : interdisciplinary perspectives external link
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This editorial introduces ten research articles, which form part of this special issue, exploring the governance of “European values” inside data flows. Protecting fundamental human rights and critical public interests that undergird European societies in a global digital ecosystem poses complex challenges, especially because the United States and China are leading in novel technologies. We envision a research agenda calling upon different disciplines to further identify and understand European values that can adequately perform under conditions of transnational data flows.
Artificial intelligence, Data flows, Data governance, Digital connectivity, European Union, European values, Human rights, Internet governance, Personal data protection, Public policy, Societal values
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Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output? external link
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This article queries whether and to what extent works produced with the aid of AI systems – AI-assisted output – are protected under EU copyright standards. We carry out a doctrinal legal analysis to scrutinise the concepts of “work”, “originality” and “creative freedom”, as well as the notion of authorship, as set forth in the EU copyright acquis and developed in the case-law of the Court of Justice. On this basis, we develop a four-step test to assess whether AI-assisted output qualifies as an original work of authorship under EU law, and how the existing rules on authorship may apply. Our conclusion is that current EU copyright rules are generally suitable and sufficiently flexible to deal with the challenges posed by AI-assisted output.
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Artificial intelligence, Auteursrecht, frontpage
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Panta Rhei: A European Perspective on Ensuring a High Level of Protection of Human Rights in a World in Which Everything Flows external link
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Human rights do remain valid currency in how we approach planetary-scale computation and accompanying data flows. Today’s system of human rights protection, however, is highly dependent on domestic legal institutions, which unravel faster than the reconstruction of fitting transnational governance institutions. The chapter takes a critical look at the construction of the data flow metaphor as a policy concept inside international trade law. Subsequently, it explores how the respect for human rights ties in with national constitutionalism that becomes increasingly challenged by the transnational dynamic of digital era transactions. Lastly, the chapter turns to international trade law and why its ambitions to govern cross-border data flows will likely not advance efforts to generate respect for human rights. In conclusion, the chapter advocates for a rebalancing act that recognizes human rights inside international trade law.
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Artificial intelligence, EU law, frontpage, Human rights, Transparency, WTO law
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Ensuring the Visibility and Accessibility of European Creative Content on the World Market: The Need for Copyright Data Improvement in the Light of New Technologies external link
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In the European Strategy for Data, the European Commission highlighted the EU’s ambition to acquire a leading role in the data economy. At the same time, the Commission conceded that the EU would have to increase its pools of quality data available for use and re-use. In the creative industries, this need for enhanced data quality and interoperability is particularly strong. Without data improvement, unprecedented opportunities for monetising the wide variety of EU creative and making this content available for new technologies, such as artificial intelligence training systems, will most probably be lost. The problem has a worldwide dimension. While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.
Artificial intelligence, Collective licensing, Content moderation, Copyright, creative industry, cultural diversity, Digital Services Act (DSA), interoperability, market concentration, market failure, metadata, Music Modernization Act, recommender systems, SME, Transparency, trustworthy AI
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The commodification of trust external link
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Fundamental, wide-ranging, and highly consequential transformations take place in interpersonal, and systemic trust relations due to the rapid adoption of complex, planetary-scale digital technological innovations. Trust is remediated by planetary scale techno-social systems, which leads to the privatization of trust production in society, and the ultimate commodification of trust itself.
Modern societies rely on communal, public and private logics of trust production. Communal logics produce trust by the group for the group, and are based on familiar, ethnic, religious or tribal relations, professional associations epistemic or value communities, groups with shared location or shared past. Public trust logics developed in the context of the modern state, and produce trust as a free public service. Abstract, institutionalized frameworks, institutions, such as the press, or public education, science, various arms of the bureaucratic state create familiarity, control, and insurance in social, political, and economic relations. Finally, private trust producers sell confidence as a product: lawyers, accountants, credit rating agencies, insurers, but also commercial brands offer trust for a fee.
With the emergence of the internet and digitization, a new class of private trust producers emerged. Online reputation management services, distributed ledgers, and AI-based predictive systems are widely adopted technological infrastructures, which are designed to facilitate trust-necessitating social, economic interactions by controlling the past, the present and the future, respectively. These systems enjoy immense economic success, and they are adopted en masse by individuals and institutional actors alike.
The emergence of the private, technical means of trust production paves the way towards the widescale commodification of trust, where trust is produced as a commercial activity, conducted by private parties, for economic gain, often far removed from the loci where trust-necessitating social interactions take place. The remediation and consequent privatization and commodification of trust production has a number of potentially adverse social effects: it may decontextualize trust relationships; it removes trust from the local social, cultural relational contexts; it changes the calculus of interpersonal trust relations. Maybe more importantly as more and more social and economic relations are conditional upon having access to, and good standing in private trust infrastructures, commodification turns trust into the question of continuous labor, or devastating exclusion. By invoking Karl Polanyi’s work on fictious commodities, I argue that the privatization, and commodification of trust may have a catastrophic impact on the most fundamental layers of the social fabric.
Artificial intelligence, blockchains, commodification, frontpage, Informatierecht, Karl Polanyi, reputation, trust, trust production