Reuters via The Guardian , The Guardian; Kim Dotcom to be extradited from New Zealand to US
"As well as copyright infringement, Dotcom faces more serious charges, including money laundering and racketeering. He has long argued that he should not be held liable for copyright infringement carried out using his site, a filesharing service that allowed users to upload content and share the link with others to download."
JAMEY KEATEN, AP; China is the runaway leader in generative AI patent applications followed by the US, the UN says
"China has requested far more patents than any other country when it comes to generative AI, the U.N. intellectual property agency said Wednesday, with the United States a distant second...
The new report on patents, the first of its kind, aims to track patent applications as a possible indication of trends in artificial intelligence. It focuses only on generative AI and excludes artificial intelligence more broadly, which includes technologies like facial recognition or autonomous driving."
Emily Maxim Lamm , American Bar Association (ABA); Navigating the Patchwork of AI Laws, Standards, and Guidance
"The opening weeks of 2024 have seen a record number of state legislative proposals seeking to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) across different sectors in the United States...
With this type of rapid-fire start to the 2024 legislative season, the AI legal landscape will likely continue evolving across the board. As a result, organizations today are facing a complex and dizzying web of proposed and existing AI laws, standards, and guidance.
This article aims to provide a cohesive overview of this AI patchwork and to help organizations navigate this increasingly intricate terrain. The focus here will be on the implications of the White House AI Executive Order, existing state and local laws in the United States, the European Union’s AI Act, and, finally, governance standards to help bring these diverse elements together within a framework."
KENJIRO SUZUKI, Nikkei Asia; Japan's universities fail to make the most of intellectual property
"Due to lack of support, patents earn only 2% compared to U.S. schools"
Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP - Keith Kelly and Zach Dai, Lexology; Computer Love: Beijing Court Finds AI-Generated Image is Copyrightable in Split with United States
"In a decision issued[1] November 27, 2023, a Chinese court ruled that AI-generated content can enjoy protection under copyright law. The finding, the first of its kind in China, is in direct conflict with the human authorship requirement under U.S. copyright law and may have far-reaching implications."
Simon Sharwood, The Register; US cyber ambassador says China knows how to steal its way to dominance of cloud and AI
"China has a playbook to use IP theft to seize leadership in cloud computing, and other nations should band together to stop that happening, according to Nathaniel C. Fick, the US ambassador-at-large for cyberspace and digital policy.
Speaking at an event hosted by think tank Hudson Institute, Fick said 30 years ago democratic nations felt they had an "unassailable global advantage in telecoms" thanks to the strength of outfits like Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Bell Labs, Alcatel and Lucent.
But he feels those titans became complacent, governments stopped watching the tech develop, and "I don't think we appreciated or acted on the reality that these technologies were going to be central to our geopolitical standing."
But China noticed. And it "executed a deliberate strategy of IP theft and government subsidies."
PAUL R. MICHEL AND MATTHEW J. DOWD, The Hill; Patents, spy balloons and outcompeting China: What our leaders are missing
"For all of U.S. history, patents have provided the needed incentives. Without reliable patent protection, few corporate decision-makers or venture capital leaders would make the investments to support the breakthroughs.
And now, more breakthroughs are exactly what America needs to counter China’s accelerating technology surge. Think computer chips, genetic and personalized medicine, clean energy, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies of the 21st century.
But we’re starting to lag behind China, which is devoting untold resources toward becoming the global leader. A recent Harvard Kennedy School report warned that China is set to overtake the United States, if U.S. policy does not change."
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The head of ASML, the chip toolmaker that is Europe’s biggest tech company, said he was guarding against intellectual property theft more fiercely than “ever before”, as a geopolitical tussle forces China to bolster its homegrown semiconductor industry. Peter Wennink said growing restrictions imposed by the US on China’s ability to source cutting-edge chips and semiconductor equipment had raised the stakes for the company’s security efforts. “It’s like 1973, it’s like the oil crisis,” Wennink told the Financial Times, pointing to increasing efforts by the US, Europe and Japan to bolster their domestic chipmaking capabilities. “Oil was always there until it wasn’t, and it was a strategic commodity. Fast forward to 2020 and it’s the same thing with chips.”"
, The New York Times Magazine ; The Daring Ruse That Exposed China’s Campaign to Steal American Secrets
"Although China publicly denies engaging in economic espionage, Chinese officials will indirectly acknowledge behind closed doors that the theft of intellectual property from overseas is state policy. James Lewis, a former diplomat now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, recalls participating in a meeting in 2014 or so at which Chinese and American government representatives, including an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, discussed the subject. “An assistant secretary from the U.S. Department of Defense was explaining: Look, spying is OK — we spy, you spy, everybody spies, but it’s for political and military purposes,” Lewis recounted for me. “It’s for national security. What we object to is your economic espionage. And a senior P.L.A. colonel said: Well, wait. We don’t draw the line between national security and economic espionage the way you do. Anything that builds our economy is good for our national security.” The U.S. government’s response increasingly appears to be a mirror image of the Chinese perspective: In the view of U.S. officials, the threat posed to America’s economic interests by Chinese espionage is a threat to American national security.'
Like China’s economy, the spying carried out on its behalf is directed by the Chinese state. The Ministry of State Security, or M.S.S., which is responsible for gathering foreign intelligence, is tasked with collecting information in technologies that the Chinese government wants to build up. The current focus, according to U.S. counterintelligence experts, aligns with the “Made in China 2025” initiative announced in 2015. This industrial plan seeks to make China the world’s top manufacturer in 10 areas, including robotics, artificial intelligence, new synthetic materials and aerospace. In the words of one former U.S. national security official, the plan is a “road map for theft.”"
Nicholas Yong , BBC News; Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets
"It is part of a broader struggle as China strives to gain technological knowhow to power its economy and its challenge to the geopolitical order, while the US does its best to prevent a serious competitor to American power from emerging.
The theft of trade secrets is attractive because it allows countries to "leapfrog up global value chains relatively quickly - and without the costs, both in terms of time and money, of relying completely on indigenous capabilities", Nick Marro of the Economist Intelligence Unit told the BBC.
Last July FBI director Christopher Wray told a gathering of business leaders and academics in London that China aimed to "ransack" the intellectual property of Western companies so it can speed up its own industrial development and eventually dominate key industries.
He warned that it was snooping on companies everywhere "from big cities to small towns - from Fortune 100s to start-ups, folks that focus on everything from aviation, to AI, to pharma"."
GLYN MOODY, Walled Culture; Public domain: a belated step forward, two huge steps back
"Nor is Canada alone in its folly. Another post on this blog last year noted that New Zealand too has decided to extend its copyright term despite the moral and economic arguments against it. Once more, the reason was a trade deal – with the UK – one of whose requirements was this unnecessary strengthening of copyright. What this means in practice is that for the next 20 years, neither Canada nor New Zealand will see any published works enter the public domain on the first of January. This creates a massive historical void in those countries’ culture, for no good reason.
Although we can celebrate the wonderful works that have finally entered the public domain in places like America after being locked up behind copyright’s walls for so long, we should be outraged that two countries have just taken a massive step backwards in this respect.
Featured image created with Stable Diffusion."
Staff and agencies, The Guardian; US court sentences Chinese spy to 20 years for stealing trade secrets
"A US federal court has sentenced a Chinese intelligence officer to 20 years in prison after he was convicted last year of plotting to steal trade secrets from from US and French aviation and aerospace companies.
Xu Yanjun was accused of a lead role in a five-year Chinese state-backed scheme to steal commercial secrets from GE Aviation, one of the world’s leading aircraft engine manufacturers, and France’s Safran Group, which was working with GE on engine development.
Xu was one of 11 Chinese nationals, including two intelligence officers, named in October 2018 indictments in federal court in Cincinnati, Ohio, where GE Aviation is based."
Here are six recommendations for how the U.S. can lead on AI from the U.S. Chamber's fifth and final AI Commission hearing in Washington, D.C. on July 21, 2022.
"The U.S. may lose its position as a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) if we do not modernize our intellectual property system and bolster our national security strategy. That emerged as the key theme at the U.S. Chamber’s fifth and final AI Commission field hearing, hosted in Washington, D.C. last week. Experts from civil society, government, academia, and industry gathered to discuss this and other important issues related to the use and regulation of AI.
U.S. Chamber President and CEO Suzanne Clark opened the hearing by noting several challenges ahead, such as cooperation between Russia and China to compete against the U.S., intellectual property (IP) theft, and regulation from abroad. With regard to the Commission’s forthcoming policy recommendations, she noted, “You can count on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to do something with this. You can count on us to not just produce a white paper but to really turn it into action, into work.”
Here are six recommendations for how the U.S. can lead on AI:..."
Harris Bricken - Fred Rocafort, Lexology; AI and Copyright in China
"In the landmark Shenzhen Tencent v. Shanghai Yingxun case, the Nanshan District People’s Court considered whether an article written by Tencent’s AI software Dreamwriter was entitled to copyright protection. The court found that it was, with copyright vesting in Dreamwriter’s developers, not Dreamwriter itself. In its decision, the court noted that “the arrangement and selection of the creative team in terms of data input, trigger condition setting, template and corpus style choices are intellectual activities that have a direct connection with the specific expression of the article.” These intellectual activities were carried out by the software developers.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has distinguished between works that are generated without human intervention (“AI-generated”) and works generated with material human intervention and/or direction (“AI-assisted”). In the case of AI-assisted works, artificial intelligence is arguably just a tool used by humans. Vesting of copyright in the humans involved in these cases is consistent with existing copyright law, just as an artist owns the copyright to a portrait made using a paintbrush or a song recorded using a guitar. The scenario in the Tencent case falls in the AI-assisted bucket, with Dreamwriter being the tool."
From IU Libraries: "Finding Owners of Copyright...
The online database Writers, Artists, and Their Copyright Holders is a guide run by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Reading to identify owners and contact information of copyright holders. For example, it reveals that Sylvia Plath's copyrights are owned by her estate, which is represented by the London publisher of Faber & Faber."
Associated Press; ‘Pooh,’ ‘Sun Also Rises’ among works going public in 2022
"“Winnie the Pooh” and “The Sun Also Rises” are going public.
A.A. Milne’s beloved children’s book and Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel, along with films starring Buster Keaton and Greta Garbo are among the works from 1926 whose copyrights will expire Saturday, putting them in the public domain as the calendar flips to 2022.
Poetry collections “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and “Enough Rope” by Dorothy Parker will also turn 95 and enter the public domain under U.S. law.
The silent films “Battling Butler” starring and directed by Buster Keaton, “The Temptress” starring Greta Garbo, “The Son of the Sheik” starring Rudolph Valentino, and “For Heaven’s Sake” starring Harold Lloyd are also becoming public property.
And under 2018 legislation by Congress, sound recordings from the earliest area of electronic audio will become available."
