I Wonder … What if our “belief” in something turns into our “faith” in it? For the last few months, I have been wondering if our belief in “fair dealing” (or broadly, “limitations and exceptions”) has silently slipped into our “faith” in it –  a faith that demands complete surrender to it while blinding us…

In his classic work, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy’, Josef Schumpeter referred to the ‘waves of creative destruction’ to describe how monopoly rents incentivise entrepreneurs to take risk and innovate. The monopoly rent that the entrepreneur derives from his innovation is short-lived, as another wave of creative destruction soon replaces this wave, and gives way to…

Copyright protection in machine-generated works is not a new issue for law makers. The traditional concept of human authorship was first challenged with the emergence of photography and this has continued every time a new technology comes about. In the U.S., the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884) extended copyright…

Machine readable opt-outs from TDM As we head into the last month of the current EU legislative term, there are increasing signs that EU lawmakers are unable to agree on the AI Act, which was supposed to be one of the crowning digital policy achievements of Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission. Recent media reports suggest…

Introduction Generative AI is disrupting the creative process(es) of intellectual works on an unparalleled scale. More and more AI systems offer services that push users’ production capacity for new literary and artistic works beyond unforeseen barriers. Algorithmic tools are gradually colonizing every creative sector, from being able to generate text (i.e., ChatGPT, Smodin), to perform…

Welcome to the third trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between July and September 2023 in EU copyright law. The autumn has started with full speed – the courts and the policy makes have been very active. This round up series…

Introduction The current international legal framework for text and data mining (TDM) is highly disharmonized, showing a variety of approaches that span from completely unregulated to partially and fully regulated. Furthermore, regulation is not uniform, and it addresses relevant stakeholders (creative and content industries, tech firms, users, research, and the public sector) in various ways….

The booming industry of generative artificial intelligence (AI) is facing its first regulatory attempt in China. On April 11th, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a draft of the Regulation for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services (the ‘draft Regulation’) for public consultation, which includes 21 articles detailing the proposed regulatory framework for the generative AI industry….

TLDR   Generative AI is one of the hot topics in copyright law today. In the EU, a crucial legal issue is whether using in-copyright works to train generative AI models is copyright infringement or falls under existing text and data mining (TDM) exceptions in the Copyright in Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive. In particular,…

A series of recent amendments to copyright law, including in the EU Copyright and the Digital Single Market Directive (Art. 3 and 4) and in Singapore’s new Copyright Act (Art. 243, 244), seek to protect the ability of text and data mining researchers to use copyrighted content in their work. “Text and data mining” (“TDM”)…