Thursday 5 March 2026, 18:00 (BST); EB206

The event is free to attend, but registration is required.  Please e-mail Professor Dinusha Mendis at dmendis@bournemouth.ac.uk to book your place.

Abstract

Generative AI has startled the copyright owners and creative industry by its unprecedented and disruptive capacity to produce texts, images, sounds, voices and other cultural content. Copyright and related rights owners have initiated dozens of lawsuits worldwide against AI platforms, for the presence of copyrighted works in the datasets on which the AI models are trained, the resemblance of some AI-generated outputs with specific protected creations, or the unauthorised capture of value and investment of masses of works. Their legal arguments however are confronted with many contrary copyright principles, such as the idea/expression dichotomy and the lack of protection of style, the notion of derivative work, the difficulty to get remuneration for massive uses. Such difficulty might lead to a dissolution of copyright as a protection of authors and performers to an investment-related protection of aggregators of works. This public lecture will review the claims that have been articulated against the deployment of generative AI and the many dilemmas or puzzles they raise for an effective protection of creators, performers and their remuneration.

Severine Dusollier is Professor of Intellectual Property in the Law School of Sciences Po Paris and holds a Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the Head of the Master in Innovation Law. She is a Qualified Member of the CSPLA (French Copyright Council), a founding member of the European Copyright Society. A long-time recognised expert of European copyright law, her current research interests are the concept of authorship, contractual protection and remuneration of authors and performers, artificial intelligence and its impact on copyright and authorship, exceptions and limitations, commons and property, public domain.