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3 October 2016CopyrightEmma Barraclough

Teaching robots copyright

Could your secretary’s job be done by a robot? Your trainee’s? Yours? With rapid advances in technology, few would bet against the development of machines able to carry out tasks that are now the preserve of smart people in white collar professions.

But how will this trend affect copyright? Work by a group of academics at the University of Edinburgh is considering how the law should deal with robots that become co-creators. It is a complex issue that raises a series of legal, ethical and technological challenges.

The team, led by CREATe researcher Burkhard Schafer, has published a paper titled  “A fourth law of robotics? Copyright and the law and ethics of machine co-production” in the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law.

In it the team outlines how robots may be used in the future: industrial robots could copy the movements of real workers with the aim of replacing them; a care-giving robot could listen to the news in order to provide a summary to its client; and robots could generate high-quality music, poetry and prose.

This brave new world offers plenty of new business models that have the potential to cut costs and deliver results more quickly. Robots are being tested to write news reports and books from raw data, for example, cutting out the journalistic middleman. But whatever form these technological breakthroughs take, it is vital to “teach robots copyright from copy wrong”, argue Schafer and his colleagues.

The researchers explain how advances in robot technology have both upstream and downstream consequences for copyright law. Upstream, the development of smart robots raises questions about the robot’s right to access and make copies of older copyright work; downstream there are questions about the legal status of the robot’s output. If a robot produces a piece of “creative” work then what rights should be attached to it, and who should own them?

“If a robot produces a piece of ‘creative’ work then what rights should be attached to it, and who should own them?”

In a lawyer’s ideal world, robots will access only data they are allowed to access, use it only in legally permissible ways, and ensure that the economic benefits of new works they create accrue to their owners.

How can this goal be achieved? Schafer argues in favour of a form of digital rights management (DRM) system. These have had a bad press in recent years: they are criticised by copyright users as a draconian way of preventing copying content on the one hand, but often circumvented by committed hackers on the other.

The researchers contend that DRM has the potential to be far more successful for use with robots by preventing them accessing material for which they have no licence. This could be done by incorporating so-called copymark html tags into digital material. In this way, DRM is no longer a restrictive tool but a liberating one, say Schafer and his colleagues.

Rather than simply issuing an outright ban on the use of copyright material, smart DRM could be made flexible enough to advise robots on how the material could be used, by the use of embedded licences. This would lead to what the authors describe as “artificial intelligence (AI)-facilitated regulatory compliance”.

This cannot be the whole solution, however. Licences may set out how material can be used in black and white terms, but statute is a rather greyer matter. Copyright laws—and the exceptions contained in them—are often context-specific, as every IP lawyer knows. That makes it almost impossible for robots to understand and interpret.

Can robots be trained to interpret the rules in any meaningful way? The authors suggest that developers in charge of programming robots adopt the approach used by many copyright users and their legal advisers in the real world—that of assessing the real litigation risk of infringement. Say Schafer and his team: “Robots need not be law-compliant all the time; they need, like us, to be compliant only when and to the extent that it matters.”

Emma Barraclough is an industry fellow at  CREATe, the RCUK Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy. You can find out more about its work at www.CREATe.ac.uk

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