Noted copyright scholar and fair use advocate Pamela Samuelson will be a featured speaker at the 2024 RightsTech AI Summit at Digital Entertainment World. The Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkley, Samuelson has been a prominent voice in debates around the intersection of copyright and technology over the past two decades. She has recently emerged as a vocal advocate for treating the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models as a fair use under copyright law. She’ll be chatting with Sophie Goossens, partner in the Entertainment and Media Industry Group at Reed Smith.
The RightsTech Project is excited to announce Reed Smith LLP and the UCLA Center for Media, Entertainment and Sports as our new partners for the RightsTech AI Summit @ DEW, presented by Digital Media Wire. The event will be held at the Carnesale Commons conference center on the campus of UCLA on February 5, 2024. Join us for a full day of panels and keynotes focused on generative AI, copyright, licensing, rights investing and more. Early bird registration is now open,
AGENDA
Welcome & Opening Remarks
9:15 AM – 9:30 AM PT
Granting Permission: Toward a Licensing Model for Generative AI
9:30 AM – 10:15 AM PT
Artists, authors, and media companies agree that the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models requires a license and remuneration to rights owners. But how would such a licensing regime be implemented? If direct licensing is impractical at the scale required, how should any collective licensing system be designed? How would it be managed? Are existing collective licensing systems up to the task? This panel will examine how artists and rights owners in different media sectors thinking about the challenge.
Keynote Conversation
10:15 AM – 10:45 AM PT
More information available soon.
Networking Break
10:45 AM – 11:00 AM PT
Opting Out of AI Training
11:00 AM – 11:45 PM PT
While artists and rights owners await action by lawmakers and the courts on copyright rules for generative AI, do-not-train tags, data “poisoning,” and other new technical measures could offer another avenue for creators to protect their work against unlicensed use to train AI models. This panel will highlight the latest tools being developed, how they’re being implemented and who is adopting them.
Featured Presentations
11:45 AM – 12:15 PM PT
More information available soon.
Lunch
12:15 PM – 1:30 PM PT
Update on AI Regulation & Legislation
1:30 PM – 2:15 PM PT
An overview of the latest AI-related regulatory and legislative initiatives. Where things stand, from the implanting the European Union’s AI Act, to copyright laws, to antitrust enforcement and creating a federal publicity right.
The Price of Rights in the Age of AI
2:15 PM – 3:00 PM PT
From song catalogs, to film and television libraries, to literary estates, copyrights have been a hot asset class. But has the market cooled? How has the rapid growth of generative AI affected valuations, and what does the new macroeconomic environments portend for the future of rights investing?
Networking Break
3:00 PM PT – 3:15 PM PT
Copyrighting Generative AI
3:15 PM – 4:00 PM PT
In the most of the world, works created by artificial intelligence cannot be copyrighted. But works containing AI elements alongside the work of human creators sometimes can be. But where is the line? How much AI is too much? How can creators make sure their works containing AI elements can be protected?
AI & Content ID
4:00 PM – 4:45 PM PT
Identifying and detecting works produced by AI is essential for filtering AI content from streaming royalty pools and preventing fraud. This panel will highlight the latest efforts to develop effective AI detection and identification tools and their integration with real world services and applications.
EXTRA The New York Timesapparently has withdrawn its support for a nascent effort otherwise involving several leading news organizations aimed at filing one or more lawsuits against AI developers for scraping publishers’ archives without permission. Instead, the Paper of Record is reportedly considering unilateral litigation against OpenAI, after negotiations collapsed between the Times and the ChatGPT-developer over the terms of use of Times content to train the large language model (LLM) AI system.
It took U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell all of 15 pages to dispense with AI developer Stephen Thaler’s argument that the U.S. Copyright Office and the U.S. Supreme Court have been misreading copyright law and the Constitution for the last 139 years. In granting the Copyright Office’s motion for summary judgment against Thaler last week in his lawsuit challenging the Office’s repeated refusal to accept registration for an image Thaler maintained was “autonomously created” by a generative AI system, Judge Howell reaffirmed the principle that copyright protection extends only to works created by human authors. Just as every court has done uniformly since 1884 when the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of extending copyright protection to photographs in Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony.
While the new Frontier Model Forum is not primarily intended to address the controversies swirling around intellectual property and AI, some of what is expected to come out of the effort could, at least incidentally, help advance what copyright litigation and agitation have so far failed to achieve, or even articulate: a plausible means by which the the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems, and the copyrightability of their output, could be subject to workable licensing regimes. Among those is the expected introduction of a method for identifying and flagging AI-generated works for users.
EXTRA Hollywood movies and TV shows have been brimming with computer-generated images for years, from superhero special effects to entire virtual sets digitally rendered in 3D with EPIC Games’ Unreal Engine. So it should have come as no surprise that studios would be keen to render actors digitally once the technology became available. It now has, thanks to recent advances in generative artificial technology. An actor’s likeness can be scanned or captured from existing footage, their voice taken from a recording, and fed into an AI engine to insert them into a scene or situation without the human original needed on set.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), the union representing below-the-line workers in the entertainment business, last week issued a list of “core principles” for the use of artificial intelligence technology in stage and screen production. Among them is the need to develop “clear definitions that categorize various types of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ in order to advance enforceable legislative and collective bargaining oversight. IATSE will also urgently identify which crafts and Local Unions are most at-risk of being affected in the immediate future.”
EXTRA Picking up where the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Google left off, USA Today-publisher Gannett Co. this week filed its own lawsuit against the search giant in U.S. district court in New York. The 80-page complaint covers much the same ground as DOJ’s filing, accusing Google of using anticompetitive tactics to achieve an illegal monopoly over the digital advertising market. But the Gannett suit seeks to make explicit what is only implicit in the DOJ action: News publishers are being directly harmed by Google’s actions.
EXTRA Antitrust authorities in the European Union are apparently fed up with what they view as Google’s ongoing anticompetitive behavior in the online advertising business. Having levied at least three antitrust fines against the search giant in recent years totaling nearly $9 billion but doing little to alter Google’s business practices, the EU’s executive arm, the European Commission, is now recommending a breakup of the Alphabet unit’s ad-tech monopoly through the forced sale of assets.
EXTRA The timing was mere coincidence, and the context different. But the official organs or the copyright industries were quick to pounce on what is at least a colorable connection between the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Lynn Goldsmith and the current bubbling controversy around the use of copyrighted works to train generative AI models.
