Maurizio Borghi – Algorithmic Commons: how copyright can mitigate the dangers of artificial intelligence

InfoSoc Seminar Series

Wednesday 6 November 2019, 15:00, Room W416

Big Data analytics – lately called more emphatically “Artificial Intelligence” (AI) – has the potential to perform duties that traditionally require human intelligence and labour. Systems powered by AI include, for example, automated translation, originality assessment, sound and image recognition, facial detection. What all these systems have in common is the fact that, in order to “train” the underpinning algorithms, they need access to large amounts of human-created works, which may be protected by copyright or neighbouring rights. Scholars have addressed the problem posed by copyright as a legal barrier to unfettered access to works by AI, and have advocated for a broad scope of fair use. In Europe, an exception for text and data mining has been introduced by the Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market (2019/790). The paper discusses some of the dangers created by unregulated use of AI and how the norm introduced by the new copyright directive can be used to mitigate such dangers.

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Maurizio Borghi is the Director of CIPPM / Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence

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