The Stationers' Company

AI inventions have arrived

but can copyright cope?

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Gathered in the cradle of copyright, the Court Room of the Stationers’

Company, were some of the finest minds on the principles of copyright.

Evolved more than 300 years ago from the rough compliance

mechanisms of Stationers to a series of moves by our Company in

Parliament in the late 17th Century, Stationers’ efforts led to the much vaunted Statute of Anne in 1710 as the first copyright law in the world.

But the question taxing the minds of the 60 or so of us assembled for an IPso FACTo (IP FACTs…got it?) debate on 18 November was whether thinking machines needed a regulatory framework? And whether the laws supporting copyright and patents were fit for purpose in a world of Artificial Intelligence (AI)? And basically the answers were Yes....and No.

On the platform were two practitioners at the forefront of change. Bruce MacCormack of CBC, the Canadian equivalent of BBC, is currently working with the BBC on a joint project to examine how AI will be used and managed in media companies. In his own words “I manage technology change for media companies and fight entropy”. So managing an orderly approach to questions such as how AI might be used for journalism.

Our second guest was Nigel Swycher, CEO of Cipher, an organisation which claims to be the first analytics product to aggregate, analyse and visualise the world's IP data. With them were Liveryman Laurence Kaye, Stationers’ “resident” IP lawyer, and Master Stationer Trevor Fenwick presiding in his capacity as driving force of Stationers’ copyright initiatives over a 12 year span which, he reminded us, had also included the production of a jointly edited Stationers’ book “Copyright in the Digital Age” plus the sponsoring of a phd thesis and MA IP bursaries. There was also a Stationers’ satellite website containing content which these projects had generated, edited and maintained by Ian Locks and, as Ian described briefly, recently rejuvenated.

“In those 10 years we have seen a great deal of disruption,” said the Master, a self-proclaimed “disruptionist”, disruption which had continued this evening with the loss of two speakers. The panel made up for any shortfall in numbers.

Laurie Kaye explained helpfully for non experts AI was any artificial system that performed part of a process and could learn along the way, built on a mathematical model. “Narrow AI”  was what we saw around us today learning to do specific tasks such as flagging inappropriate content on line.  “Artificial general intelligence”, on the other hand, was about understanding how things may develop.  The Terminator type intelligence,

Nigel Swycher said the nub of the regulatory debate was that in the view of the law, only humans could invent. “We must do something about regulation of AI now. Keep it simple. The last thing we want is disintermediation of humans. We will figure it out ... we did with photocopying. So now a machine takes a song and makes another song....nothing new!”

Explaining the CBC/BBC quandary, Bruce MacCormack said the amount of data being generated was beyond human understanding. In the broadcasting business flows of data could predict, for example, who was most likely to quit a subscription by their viewing patterns. Vast flows of facial recognition data raised the ethical dimension. “Without a robust framework we are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water and losing the tremendous benefits,” he said.

So our 309 year old copyright regime?  The detail may change but the principles remain. Amen to that!

 

 

Ian Locks

Monday 18 November 2019