The debates and lawsuits over copyright and generative artificial intelligence are just beginning, and it is too early to predict their outcomes. But even at this early stage, there is little doubt that copyright issues have the potential to reshape our experience of AI. We will look at the current issues, and the law that underlines them, in order to prepare ourselves for what might come next.
Learning Outcomes
Understand how the complexity of large language models provides a variety of different ways in which copyright can be implicated in the creation and use of generative AI.
Recognize how different aspects of the copyright law apply to AI input and output issues
Comprehend the issues being raised by the welter of lawsuits currently pending before US courts.
Gain awareness of a few of the national and international efforts to regulate generative AI.
Evaluate the risk associated with various uses of generative AI.
Instructor: Kevin Smith
Kevin Smith is the Director of Libraries at Colby College in Maine. He is a lawyer and a librarian, and has spent years teaching librarians and faculty about copyright. For a decade he served as Director of the Office for Copyright and Scholarly Communications at Duke University. In 2016 he became the Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, where he also taught Copyright Law in the KU School of Law. He moved to Maine, and Colby, in 2022, where he has continued to teach an undergraduate course about copyright and the music industry. Smith is the author of numerous articles and two books about how copyright law impacts the practice of librarians and university faculty, as well as two MOOCs addressing those topics.