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Intellectual property law is famously country specific. Each country has developed its copyright law over many years, through a mixture of statutory provisions and decisional case law. At the same time, most countries are now members of the international Berne Convention, which enables enforcement of the copyright in a work created in one Berne signatory country to be enforced in any other signatory country. The law governing enforcement of copyright, however, remains country specific.
Two countries at the heart of the development of generative AI are the United Kingdom and the United States. Many copyright infringement actions have been filed in both countries by owners of copyrights in works used to train generative AI models, against companies that developed and released AI tools.
This article explores how the United Kingdom is addressing the key copyright infringement issues as they relate to generative AI models and output, and highlights the “fair dealing” and statutory provisions unique to the country.
Fair dealing is often confused with the U.S. concept of fair use. They are both concerned with whether the unauthorized use of a copyright work is fair to the copyright owner, but despite this shared ethos, they are not the same. If an original work is used to train a “large language model” (LLM), like ChatGPT or Google’s Bard, or to create training sets or algorithms for an AI image generator, or if a copyrighted work is used as an input prompt, does the resulting data set, algorithm or expression infringe the copyright on the original works?
At a very high level, LLMs and AI image generators take apart the works they are trained on, transforming them into component parts of a neural network that are then weighted using mathematical principles. These AI-powered engines can then create new expression by breaking an input prompt into weighted tokens that are run though the engine.
Companies will have to use their judgment in balancing the risk and reward of adopting generative technology, given the mismatch between the speed of legal decision-making and generative AI technology advances. Law is slow, but technology is fast and generative AI is especially fast — the world’s largest technology companies are competing intensely to release improved versions of generative AI models.
As in the United States, copyright in the UK subsists in original literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works, as well as in sound recordings and films. The copyright owner has the exclusive right to do certain acts, including copying the copyright work, communicating the work to the public, and making adaptations of the work. Copyright is infringed by a person doing any of the acts restricted to the copyright owner, without the permission of the copyright owner.
Applying this basic proposition to generative AI raises a number of questions:
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This article highlights how copyright law in the United Kingdom differs from U.S. copyright law, and points out differences that may be crucial to entertainment and media businesses familiar with U.S law that are interested in operating in the United Kingdom or under UK law. The article also briefly addresses contrasts in UK and U.S. trademark law.
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