Machines, ethics and copyright
ChatGPT poses difficult questions in the field of authorship as well as in the field of ethics in science (and also in other fields where independent work is required).
We are getting closer to the moment when machines will be able to create independently (we are not there yet, although the result produced by a machine can already look quite similar to a human-made creation). In addition, this technology opens up endless ethical questions in the field of science, since this technology enables the “creation” of works that people can pretend to have created without this tool. These are similar ethical problems as when persons who do not meet the conditions for authorship are listed under articles or when one of these persons is omitted. For the theoreticians who have been and will write about these challenges, these are the most interesting career questions, but in reality commercial players and machine owners in particular are pushing for intellectual property rights to be granted to products produced by machines as well.
Another political point of interest: while we are still debating this in the democratic parts of the world, Ukraine has changed the copyright law in the whirlwind of war, and according to the new law, “creations” produced by machines are protected by related rights (copyright-like rights). It is not talked about very loudly, but it points to the strange backgrounds and foregrounds of the war in Ukraine.
ODIPI is organizing ERA KR21 Conference: Barriers and Incentives for Open Science in the Copyright Law that will take place on 2 December, 2024 at Hotel Four Points by Sheraton (Mons) in Ljubljana and also online.
The District Court of Hamburg ruled in the case of Kneschke v. LAION e.V. that LAION did not infringe the copyright of photographer Kneschke, as the use of his photograph was covered by the exception for text and data mining (TDM) for scientific purposes.
“Can copyright bring artificial intelligence to its knees? Which other circumstances may cause that the “making” of generative AI can dramatically change in the (near) future. This short paper presents potential challenges that copyright poses to the training of the machines on large amount of data. Different jurisdictions address these issues differently. In the USA the legality of these activities is tested in several court cases. Do gentlemen’s agreements and pragmatic symbiosis known from the “search engines business model” provide sufficient basis and/or incentive for the business model of “making” generative AI business model as well?