The free and open source developing world is abuzz with a new feature from GitHub called Copilot. This is a programming tool that has been trained using code from GitHub’s own corpus. For those familiar, GitHub is the world’s largest open source software repository, it has 40 million users and Read more
Two musicians have written a computer program that recorded in MIDI format every possible 8-note and 12-beat melody combination, resulting in 68.7 billion tunes. They claim that by doing this, they have managed to copyright every such musical combination with the stated purpose of pre-empting music copyright lawsuits in the Read more
A court in the Chinese city of Shenzen has decided that an article that was written by an artificial intelligence program has copyright protection. The article was written by Tencent’s Dreamwriter AI Writing Robot, an internal code at the Chinese tech giant that produces half a million articles per year Read more
While most of the writing with regards to artificial intelligence and copyright in recent years has been centred around the subject of authorship, perhaps the most important aspect of the question is that of copyright infringement. What happens when you train machine learning algorithms with works that are protected by Read more
It’s been a while since I have written about AI and copyright, although I have been presenting about it quite a lot. I wrote a paper entitled “Do Androids Dream of Electric Copyright?” in 2017, and then a shorter version for WIPO Magazine (it’s sobering how many more people cite Read more
Whenever I have presented about artificial intelligence in the last few years, I often get asked the question of whether training an AI with data can infringe copyright. Take for example Bot Dylan, a machine learning project that has been trained using 23,000 folk songs. Does the music it produces Read more
This is the text for my presentation at re:publica 18. The slides can be found here. I have presented at re:publica for the last couple of years, and usually I try to do so with a work in progress paper at the early stages of research, and this is no Read more