AI and copyright, methods to minimize business legal risks.

The development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has opened a new paradigm for content creation, but this process can lead to new legal challenges, as AI technology that learns from large amounts of data to generate content may infringe copyright.

Law firm Veat is leading the way in resolving copyright issues related to AI through its TIP (Technology, Intellectual Property) team, which specializes in handling AI and copyright issues, providing various legal consultations and successfully handling cases.

Copyright Issues in AI Learning Data: The US GitHub and New York Times Cases

Particularly, in recent years, major AI platforms have been embroiled in copyright infringement lawsuits, bringing the copyright issue of AI learning data into the spotlight. GitHub Copilot, a US code generation service, faced a class action lawsuit for violating open source licenses.

Copilot generates code based on numerous open source code datasets collected from the internet, and open source copyright holders argued that Copilot did not comply with licenses for the use of copyrighted works. This case can be considered a representative example that first raised the legal issue of what procedures AI should go through when learning from existing copyrighted works.

In addition, at the end of 2023, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming that ChatGPT and Bing Chat illegally used New York Times articles as learning data, and demanding the cessation of GPT models.

Initially, individual copyright holders responded in the form of class action lawsuits, but recently, major copyright holders have also filed lawsuits, and the trend of AI lawsuits is intensifying globally.

Therefore, to avoid legal issues when training AI, it is necessary to verify that the data used for training does not infringe the copyrights of others. The best approach is to agree with the original copyright holder in advance and purchase or receive content.

In particular, content automatically collected from the internet through crawling methods cannot be assumed to be permitted by the original copyright holder for use in AI model training, so caution is needed.

Copyright and Intellectual Property Specializing Law firm Veat TIP (Technology, Intellectual Property) Team

Law firm Veat operates a TIP (Technology, Intellectual Property) team to provide more specialized legal advice related to copyright and intellectual property. The TIP team has a deep understanding of future technologies and new industries such as IT, software, NFTs, metaverse, and games, and provides in-depth legal advice in the fields of copyright and intellectual property.

The TIP team is led by Senior Counsel Oh Seung-jong, who has over 30 years of experience in the field of intellectual property and has served as Chairman of the Korean Copyright Committee and President of the Korean Copyright Law Association, and is comprised of Partner Attorney An Il-woon, who actively engages in IT and copyright fields, including lectures on specialized training on open source SW licenses hosted by the Korean Copyright Committee in 2024, and Senior Counsel Jeon Yong-hwan, who has extensive experience in copyright litigation and consultation.

Although the issues of AI and copyright are just beginning to be discussed, Law firm Veat TIP team proactively identifies trends in IT and new technology copyrights, and supports companies in preventing legal risks and operating their businesses stably.

If you require legal advice related to AI legal issues or copyright issues, please feel free to contact Law firm Veat at any time.

Thank you.

Law firm Veat Team