The IPA and STM worked together to organize a webinar on artificial intelligence with a focus on licensing related questions. The webinar took place on 21st September and was attended by over 300 people representing IPA and STM members and members of members.
Jessica Sanger, Chair of IPA’s Copyright Committee, moderated the conversation, raising many topical questions for the publishing industry. Peter Schoppert, Director of the National University of Singapore Press, and former Chair of the Singapore Book Publishers Association, spoke about the evolution of AI up to the current generative AI models, highlighting the trends of use across different industries, the different training data imperatives of large language models and the worth of the TDM licensing markets, analysing the potential impacts in the publishing industry and underlining that licensing is an imperative from a copyright perspective, while also having the potential to address some of the ethical concerns raised by generative AI such as bias, disinformation or privacy.
Sarah Fricker is Group Head of Legal of the Institute of Physics (IOP) group. She leads a team providing legal advice to IOP companies around the world, on issues including copyright and licensing. Sarah spoke about the issues currently emerging in the publishing industry in relation to AI development, including use of copyrighted materials by third parties without consent/licence, lack of transparency in terms of how AI used, research and integrity, authorship of content. She also presented the current policy discussions on AI in the UK and underlined the importance of maintaining the integrity of copyright legal frameworks to sustain established and emerging licensing markets. She reiterated that publishers stand ready to continue to license AI related uses.
IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg is Senior Vice President of User Privacy for Elsevier, where he is responsible for supporting the Elsevier business units in providing users transparency to and control over their personal data in Elsevier products and services. He spoke about the importance of publishers protecting their content and their rights, in particular with regards to article 4 of the DSM Directive. He focused on underlining the importance of updating copyright statements in publishers’ websites, and on explaining in detail how machine-readable solutions can and are helping publishers to protect their websites and content from unauthorized uses. IJsbrand gave a detailed overview of how the W3C TDM standard operates to protect publishers’ content, explaining how STM publishers are working together on this important development.
We thank our colleagues at STM for this fruitful collaboration and our excellent speakers and moderator for their outstanding contributions to this important debate. A recording of the session is available for IPA and STM members and their members. Please contact the IPA or STM Secretariats for more information.