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.
On Friday 23 June 2023, a webinar entitled “Copyright and Legal Basis for Generative Artificial Intelligence Training” was held as the inaugural event of an informal research network in the region in the field of copyright. Researchers from Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and North Macedonia participated in the event, which is part of the national Open Knowledge Day initiative and the national and regional coordination activities carried out by ODIPI under the auspices of Knowledge Rights 21.
The new report of the Knowledge Rights 21 project partner SPARC Europe is now available.
Open Data and Intellectual Property Institute ODIPI is organising a webinar on the topic of text and data mining copyright exception, titled “Copyright-legal basis for training generative AI”, as part of the national and regional coordination of the Knowledge Rights 21 programme, led by Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič.
Maja Bogataj Jančič has been invited as a representative of the Open Data and Intellectual Property Institute to attend the User Rights Network and Library Copyright Alliance meetings in Washington DC.