DAM, AI and Copyright Basics
Each year HS Events hosts three Digital Asset Management conferences: The Henry Stewart DAM Conferences take place in Los Angeles in March, Europe in June and New York in September. This year the annual Henry Stewart DAM LA conference focused on ‘The Art & Practice of Managing Digital Media - all from the user’s perspective.’ Within the Welcome of the conference in Los Angeles, David H. Lipsey, Conference Chair, notes that “The importance of DAM grows with every year. Trends that will only accelerate with advances in AI, text to voice, voice to text, text to visual and visual to text.” In addition to the increased interest and use of AI, digital rights management issues continue to be critical for use and accessibility. Lipsey notes that “with every advance in technology there comes novel issues in the protection of intellectual property rights; management and corporate responsibilities; talent management; and, leadership roles and responsibilities. For many information sciences specialists and members of the professional DAM community, digital rights issues appear to be very complicated. But as a trained lawyer, I often argue that intellectual property rights are actually rather simple.
In my Digital Asset Management course, taught by Professor John Horodyski at San Jose State University, School of Information, my classmate articulated that "The complicated entanglement of use, fair use, copyright, rights purchasing, licensing, etc. really makes my mind melt!" I wanted to explain that although these. legal issues can seem complicated, I think that they can be fairly simple to understand. In our discussion on the matter of intellectual property rights, I tried to simplify the understanding of basic copyright law. Basically, a copyright owner has the exclusive right to use, profit and control every bit of the creative work or digital asset that he owns. I like to think of intellectual property as if it’s real property, because the rights should be the same. If I am the legal owner of my home, I own all of my home and have a right to use 100 percent of my home, to lease (or license use of) my home, to allow someone to stay at my home for free, or even to allow to someone to shoot a film on my front porch or a video in my back yard. Under no condition, can some one use any part of my home without my permission. A neighbor cannot sit on my front porch steps for a few minutes, or park their car in my drive way for an hour, without my permission. So, in this analogy, my exclusive rights are not negotiable. We can say the same of intellectual property rights, such as copyrights, patents and trademarks. The owners have exclusive rights. From those exclusive rights come the exclusive right to use, profit from or license the copyrighted material, such as digital assets. Thus far, only the legal owner or an agent of the legal owner has any authority to use, license or profit from the intellectual property. Those rights issues are distinct from fair use.
Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows for an exception to the exclusive use by the copyright owner. And, indeed, fair use is a complicated legal doctrine. But what is not complicated is who can determine what qualifies as fair use. Only a court of law can apply the legal analysis necessary to determine what qualifies as fair use, and is therefore an exception to the copyright owner's exclusive use and control of his intellectual property. So, this is why I say its simple: Copyright owners have exclusive right to determine use and control of all assets and only a court can apply the legal doctrine to determine what qualifies as fair use. Clearly, the main issue that complicates fair use and legal rights of intellectual property is individuals that want to claim fair use for their own personal benefit, and choose to define it in their own words, to meet their own personal needs. For instance, I know an operations coordinator that licenses music for film, television and commercials at Columbia Records, for Sony Music. Her team manages the rights of all the front-line music (music released within the last three years) for some of the top musicians in the world. She will often receive requests for free licenses, relatively inexpensive licenses ($200-$750), or more complicated licenses, where side artists might be involved, who are not at her label. If she cannot get the licenses cleared by time the use aires, the music use cannot be authorized. There has been more than one occasion, where music supervisors on projects have just blurted out the word fair use. "I think we can find an exception under fair use." But its pretty clear that fair use does not apply to commercial use of any copyrighted material. The best arguments for fair use are when intellectual property is used for an educational purpose to promote open dialogues about the work, such as in criticism of the work or reviews of the material. A film review would be a good example, where it would be valuable to show a portion of a film clip or a still frame, for analysis.
With the title of the conference, DAM LA 2023 being ‘The Art & Practice of Managing Digital Media - all from the user’s perspective,’ the emphasis on the user’s perspective and experience is critical. And, digital rights management and intellectual property rights licensing and clearances directly impact the user’s access to digital assets. One interesting question posed to the panelists of subject matter experts pertained to copyrights over AI generated content. Again, this can appear to be a complicated issue, and it did stump each of the three panelists presented with question. But both the question and the answer are simple. Who owns the copyright to AI generated content? The entity or individual who paid for or “commissioned” the creation of the AI content owns it. Commissioned is placed in quotation marks referencing basic copyright law on ownership rights for commissioned work.
Resources
Copyright Basics
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf
DAM Los Angeles 2023
https://www.henrystewartconferences.com/events/dam-la-2023
No comments:
Post a Comment