EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence; European Parliament News, June 14, 2023

 European Parliament News ; EU AI Act: first regulation on artificial intelligence

"As part of its digital strategy, the EU wants to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure better conditions for the development and use of this innovative technology. AI can create many benefits, such as better healthcare; safer and cleaner transport; more efficient manufacturing; and cheaper and more sustainable energy.

In April 2021, the European Commission proposed the first EU regulatory framework for AI. It says that AI systems that can be used in different applications are analysed and classified according to the risk they pose to users. The different risk levels will mean more or less regulation. Once approved, these will be the world’s first rules on AI."

'Gone With the Wind' and 'Wizard of Oz' protected by copyright in merchandising suit; Los Angeles Times, 11/1/16

David Ng, Los Angeles Times; 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Wizard of Oz' protected by copyright in merchandising suit:

[Kip Currier: This week in my IP and "Open" Movements graduate course we looked at two high profile music infringement lawsuits, Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset and Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum. Good case studies (among others) for thinking about use of copyrighted works by individuals/institutions and copyright enforcement. Timely to see Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset damages assessment and rationale cited in the case discussed below.]

"The defense filed another appeal, but this week, a court upheld the ruling as well as damages amounting to $10,000 for 257 copyright infractions, resulting in an award of nearly $2.6 million.

The judgment “sends a strong message about the risk of engaging in copyright and trademark infringement,” said Frederick J. Sperling, a partner at the law firm Schiff Hardin LLP, who represented Warner Bros.

Valencia, the defendant, didn’t respond to a request for comment sent through a lawyer.

The case was filed in Missouri because some of the licensees selling the products in question were based in the state.

In upholding the damages amount, the appeals court cited a 2012 Capitol Records case in which the label sued an individual for putting copyrighted songs on the Kazaa file-sharing platform. In that case, a court awarded damages of $9,250 per infringed work.

Damages for copyright infringement range between $750 and $30,000 per instance, according to U.S. law.

In its 2011 decision, the 8th Circuit court ruled that characters such as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, as well as Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, are “sufficiently distinctive to merit character protection under the respective film copyrights.”"

Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project; Hastings Center Report, 12/17/15

Oscar A. Zarate, Julia Green Brody, Phil Brown, Monica D. Ramirez-Andreotta, Laura Perovich andJacob Matz, Hastings Center Report; Balancing Benefits and Risks of Immortal Data: Participants’ Views of Open Consent in the Personal Genome Project:

"Abstract

An individual's health, genetic, or environmental-exposure data, placed in an online repository, creates a valuable shared resource that can accelerate biomedical research and even open opportunities for crowd-sourcing discoveries by members of the public. But these data become “immortalized” in ways that may create lasting risk as well as benefit. Once shared on the Internet, the data are difficult or impossible to redact, and identities may be revealed by a process called data linkage, in which online data sets are matched to each other. Reidentification (re-ID), the process of associating an individual's name with data that were considered deidentified, poses risks such as insurance or employment discrimination, social stigma, and breach of the promises often made in informed-consent documents. At the same time, re-ID poses risks to researchers and indeed to the future of science, should re-ID end up undermining the trust and participation of potential research participants.

The ethical challenges of online data sharing are heightened as so-called big data becomes an increasingly important research tool and driver of new research structures. Big data is shifting research to include large numbers of researchers and institutions as well as large numbers of participants providing diverse types of data, so the participants’ consent relationship is no longer with a person or even a research institution. In addition, consent is further transformed because big data analysis often begins with descriptive inquiry and generation of a hypothesis, and the research questions cannot be clearly defined at the outset and may be unforeseeable over the long term. In this article, we consider how expanded data sharing poses new challenges, illustrated by genomics and the transition to new models of consent. We draw on the experiences of participants in an open data platform—the Personal Genome Project—to allow study participants to contribute their voices to inform ethical consent practices and protocol reviews for big-data research."