Nina O'Sullivan, Partner and Head Knowledge Lawyer in the Innovation department has provided analysis on recent landmark intellectual property cases and the evolving legal landscape surrounding artificial intelligence in the UK.
Nina highlighted the challenges faced by the UK Government in aligning its proposed AI and copyright framework with international standards.
She commented: “While the Government has said that its preferred approach of an exception for text and data mining with rights-holder opt-out aligns with the approach already adopted the EU, there is one crucial difference. The EU regime purports to implement extra-territoriality – requiring those putting general purpose AI models on the market in the EU to comply with EU copyright law wherever the models were trained. The UK consultation merely says that the government wants to “encourage” AI developers operating in the UK to comply with UK law on AI model training, even where their models are trained in other countries, but with little information as to how this encouragement may bear fruit.
“Interestingly, one of the proposed amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill requires model developers to comply with UK copyright law regardless of where the … pre-training, development and operation take place. Of course, it is likely that these amendments will not survive, but the Government will need to face this issue head on when it responds to the consultation.”
Nina also discussed the increasing number of AI copyright infringement cases, including the Getty Images v Stability AI case in the UK, which is set to address crucial questions about liability and defences in AI-generated content.
She said: “While the focus of the discussion on the Getty case to date has largely been on jurisdictional issues relating to the training of the Stability AI models, it will be interesting to see how the court deals with other important questions, particularly around allegedly infringing outputs and where liability for those might fall, as well as any potential defences that might arise.”
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