Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever; Art News, January 8, 2024

 Shanti Escalante-De Mattei, Art News; Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His  ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever

"Abbott and Thaler’s push for copyright brings up a very basic question for artists today: how do we locate agency and creativity when we make things with machines? When is it our doing, and when is it “theirs”? This question follows the arc of history as humans design increasingly complex tools that work independently of us, even if we designed them and set them into motion. Debates have raged in public forums and in lawsuits regarding to what extent a model like Midjourney can produce genuinely novel images or whether it is just randomly stitching together disparate pixels based on its training data to generate synthetic quasi-originality. But for those who work in machine learning, this process isn’t all that different from how humans work."

Music Creators Want Consent in the AI Age, But Developers Find Safe Havens Abroad; Billboard, April 20, 2023

KRISTIN ROBINSON, Billboard; Music Creators Want Consent in the AI Age, But Developers Find Safe Havens Abroad

"Machine-learning is exponentially faster, though; it’s usually achieved by feeding millions, even billions of so-called “inputs” into an AI model to build its musical vocabulary. Due to the sheer scale of data needed to train current systems that almost always includes the work of professionals, and to many copyright owners’ dismay, almost no one asks their permission to use it.

Countries around the world have various ways of regulating what’s allowed when it comes to what’s called the text and data mining of copyrighted material for AI training. And some territories are concluding that fewer rules will lead to more business.

China, Israel, Japan, South Korea and Singapore are among the countries that have largely positioned themselves as safe havens for AI companies in terms of industry-friendly regulation. In January, Israel’s Ministry of Justice defined its stance on the issue, saying that “lifting the copyright uncertainties that surround this issue [of training AI generators] can spur innovation and maximize the competitiveness of Israeli-based enterprises in both [machine-learning] and content creation.”"

Copyright Law and Machine Learning for AI: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?; Co-Sponsored by the United States Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Tuesday, October 26, 2021 10 AM - 3 PM EDT

Copyright Law and Machine Learning for AI: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?

Co-Sponsored by the United States Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office

"The U.S. Copyright Office and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office are hosting an October 26, 2021, conference that will explore machine learning in practice, how existing copyright laws apply to the training of artificial intelligence, and what the future may hold in this fast-moving policy space. The event will comprise three one-hour sessions, with a lunch break, and is expected to run from 10:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. eastern time. 

Due to the state of the COVID-19 pandemic, the on-site portion of the program initially scheduled to take place at the Library of Congress's Montpelier Room has been canceled. All sessions will still take place online as planned. Participants must register to attend this free, public event.

Download the agenda here."

A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job; The Washington Post, October 22, 2019

Drew Harwell, The Washington Post; A face-scanning algorithm increasingly decides whether you deserve the job 

HireVue claims it uses artificial intelligence to decide who’s best for a job. Outside experts call it ‘profoundly disturbing.’

"“It’s a profoundly disturbing development that we have proprietary technology that claims to differentiate between a productive worker and a worker who isn’t fit, based on their facial movements, their tone of voice, their mannerisms,” said Meredith Whittaker, a co-founder of the AI Now Institute, a research center in New York...

Loren Larsen, HireVue’s chief technology officer, said that such criticism is uninformed and that “most AI researchers have a limited understanding” of the psychology behind how workers think and behave...

“People are rejected all the time based on how they look, their shoes, how they tucked in their shirts and how ‘hot’ they are,” he told The Washington Post. “Algorithms eliminate most of that in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”...

HireVue’s growth, however, is running into some regulatory snags. In August, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a first-in-the-nation law that will force employers to tell job applicants how their AI-hiring system works and get their consent before running them through the test. The measure, which HireVue said it supports, will take effect Jan. 1."

UN agency finds US, Asian companies seek most AI patents; Associated Press, January 31, 2019

Associated Press; UN agency finds US, Asian companies seek most AI patents

"The U.N.’s intellectual property organization says companies in Japan, South Korea and the U.S. are the top filers of patent applications involving artificial intelligence.

The World Intellectual Property Organization has issued a first report aiming to show trends in AI, seen as a growth area in coming years, although still a tiny fraction of all patent applications each year.

WIPO said Thursday that machine learning is the dominant AI technique disclosed in patents."

Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong; The Conversation, May 24, 2018

Martin Kretschmer

Professor of Intellectual Property Law, University of Glasgow and Thomas Margoni

Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property and Internet Law, University of Glasgow,

The Conversation;  
Data mining: why the EU’s proposed copyright measures get it wrong

"Data that is mined with the help of machine learning techniques has been a rapid area of technological advancement – with good and bad consequences for everyone. And EU copyright law is currently caught in the crossfire.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s recent data scandal, which involved the profiling of users from their online behaviour facilitated by social networks, brought important issues to the surface about web privacy, only after it was reported that millions of people had their data harvested and improperly shared with a political consultancy.

But the same data mining technique also offers great societal benefit in fields such as traffic prediction, natural language processing and the identification of potential cures for diseases.

Many people think that regulating the use of data is a matter of data protection or privacy laws. However, where the raw material subjected to analysis is not “personal data” but material protected under copyright law, such as texts or certain structured databases, another set of legal norms come into play. This has far reaching and little understood consequences."

Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal ; Guardian, May 29, 2018

Neil Lawrence, Guardian;

Why thousands of AI researchers are boycotting the new Nature journal  

"Many in our research community see the Nature brand as a poor proxy for academic quality. We resist the intrusion of for-profit publishing into our field. As a result, at the time of writing, more than 3,000 researchers, including many leading names in the field from both industry and academia, have signed a statement refusing to submit, review or edit for this new journal. We see no role for closed access or author-fee publication in the future of machine-learning research. We believe the adoption of this new journal as an outlet of record for the machine-learning community would be a retrograde step."

China has shot far ahead of the US on deep-learning patents; Quartz, March 2, 2018

Echo Huang, Quartz; China has shot far ahead of the US on deep-learning patents

"China is outdoing the US in some kinds of AI-related intellectual property, according to a report published in mid-February by US business research firm CB Insights. The number of patents with the words “artificial intelligence” and “deep learning” published in China has grown faster than those published in the US, particularly in 2017, the firm found. Publication is a step that comes after applications are filed but before a patent is granted. The firm looked at data from the European patent office.

When it comes to deep learning—an advanced subset of machine learning, which uses algorithms to identify complex patterns in large amounts of data—China has six times more patent publications than the US, noted the report (pdf, p.7)...

...[W]hen it comes to patents using the term “machine learning,” often conflated with the term AI, China still lags behind. Searching patents for “machine learning” found the US had 882 related patent publications while China had 77 in 2017."

Patenting the Future of Medicine: The Intersection of Patent Law and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine; Lexology, February 14, 2018

Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP - Susan Y. Tull, Lexology; Patenting the Future of Medicine: The Intersection of Patent Law and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine

"Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming the world of medicine, and the intellectual property directed to these inventions must keep pace. AI computers are diagnosing medical conditions and disorders at a rate equal to or better than their human peers, all while developing their own software code and algorithms to do so. These recent advances raise issues of patentability, inventorship, and ownership as machine-based learning evolves."

Parsing the patents: CMU seeking clear answers on AI in workforce; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, January 15, 2018

Daniel Moore, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Parsing the patents: CMU seeking clear answers on AI in workforce

"...[T]here has been sparse research into what local governments and foundations can do to cushion the blow of technology: Precisely where, how and in what professions will some of the biggest disruptors — driven by artificial intelligence — roll out first? 

“The advantage of our approach is you can see in a very granular way, where these inventions are emerging,” said Lee Branstetter, a CMU professor of economics and public policy leading the new study that is relying in part of patent filings. “And how this is all changing over time.”

The research is one of two projects awarded a total of $550,000 from the Heinz Endowments, which is marking the launch of its Future of Work initiative...

Put together, patents can be used to visualize where artificial intelligence is making gains. The idea is to display artificial intelligence shifts on a map that shows different regions and industries."

If an AI creates a work of art, who owns the rights to it?; Quartz, August 15, 2017

Robert Hart, Quartz; If an AI creates a work of art, who owns the rights to it?

"Without developing some form of framework recognizing AIs as legal persons, just as monkeys are not, we cannot award an AI copyright. “And we’re a long way from that moment, if we’ll ever get there,” Bridy says. The most likely near-term solution would be to award copyright to the owners of the AI itself, which would be similar to how employers automatically own the work their employees produce."

YouTube protects copyright with artificial intelligence; The Australian, 11/29/16

Chris Griffith, The Australian; YouTube protects copyright with artificial intelligence:

"YouTube is using artificial intelligence to thwart a game of cat and mouse by users circumventing copyright.

The Google-owned service already has algorithms for detecting copyright movie, video and music content that users post on YouTube.

Over the years, some users have developed tricks for getting around detection.

Some have posted video with colours reversed, or images of each frame reversed vertically or horizontally. Other techniques include altering colours, changing the aspect ratio, cropping frames and using a halo effect. The idea is to make video unrecognisable as copyright content...

YouTube however is fighting back. It has been delving into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning to dissemble video and music, and outfox these cunning operators.

“That’s what we’re using machine learning for, to take out these things, and to work out they are the same image,” said Harris Cohen, senior product manager of Content ID at YouTube."