A top intellectual property law journal is set to publish a landmark article about the intersection between copyright law and artificial intelligence. A group of advocates say the journal has not done enough to disclose the authors’ ties to the biggest tech companies.
A trio of digital rights groups are urging the Journal of the Copyright Society to clarify that the authors of the forthcoming article, which is still in its draft form, have previously worked for two of the biggest AI tech companies –
“We emphatically believe that it is critical for Journal of Copyright Society readers to have a full and complete picture of their financial ties to AI companies,” wrote the groups, which include watchdog organizations Revolving Door Project, Tech Transparency Project and Music Workers Alliance.
The question of how copyright law applies to generative AI has enormous consequences for the tech industry’s largest players. The New York Times Co. recently sued Microsoft and
Industry critics have pushed for better disclosure of the big tech funding behind academic articles, nonprofits and other key players in the AI debate.
The upcoming paper in the Journal of the Copyright Society, called “Talkin’ ‘Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain,” will offer key contributions to the legal scholarship around those unresolved questions. The report lays out how tech companies could violate copyright laws in every step of the process as they develop AI tools.
It’s authored by Cornell Professor
Grimmelmann himself disclosed receiving a $175,000 research grant from Microsoft in 2021. Cooper previously worked as a student researcher at Microsoft and Google; Lee works on a team at Google’s AI research lab DeepMind. Lee helped produce research that laid the groundwork for the Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI.
In a joint statement, Grimmelmann, Cooper and Lee said they did not receive funding or editorial input from any tech companies for the paper. “The only financial support for the article came from our positions at Cornell University,” they said. “No person or company provided funding for it, directly or indirectly. No one besides the three of us had any editorial control over it.”
They added the article is still going through the Journal’s editorial process and will ultimately follow “the Journal’s editorial and disclosure standards.”
“As an educational nonprofit, transparency is a nonnegotiable for our organization,” said Copyright Society Executive Director Kaitland Kubat. “We require all of our authors in the Journal of the Copyright Society to adhere to a strict disclosure policy and include pertinent information for our readers in the footnotes of every article we publish.”
Grimmelmann, Cooper and Lee said in their statement the publicly available draft “identifies us as the authors, and we prominently disclose our employment, funding, and other relevant relationships (past and present) on our websites.”
The three are in the process of forming a new AI-focused nonprofit called the GenLaw Center after they hosted a widely-attended conference on the topic last year. Though the conference was sponsored in part by Google, Microsoft and AI company
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Peter Blumberg
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