Date and Time: September 23, 2024, 4:00 PM
Room: Viale Pola, AT 11a–b
 

<p >The meeting aims to take stock of the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Congress in Pisa (September 11–13, 2024), where some ILEO members presented their latest research on intellectual property and ethical innovation. ILEO members will once again share their work, incorporating the feedback and comments received during the Congress sessions. After an exchange with the audience, the final part of the meeting will be dedicated to exploring future directions for ILEO’s activities, inspired by the discussions and collaborations fostered at the EPIP Congress, but also at the ATRIP annual Congress hosted jointly in July 2024 by the Luiss Department of Law and ILEO.
 
 
Program

4:00 PM – 4:10 PM Chair and introduction
Christophe Geiger, Professor of Law and Director of the Innovation Law and Ethics Observatory, Luiss, Rome
Presentations:
4:10–4:25 p.m. Christophe Geiger and Bernd Justin Jütte – Copyright as an Access Right: Concretizing Positive Obligations for Rightholders to Ensure the Exercise of User Rights.
4:25 PM – 4:35 PM Discussion
4:35–4:50 p.m. Francesca Di Lazzaro – Sustainable Copyright: A roadmap to fair and equitable access to education through Generative AI.
4:50 PM – 5:00 PM Discussion
5:00 PM – 5:15 PM Christophe Geiger and Vincenzo Iaia - Towards an Independent EU Regulator for Copyright Issues of Generative AI: What Role for the AI Office?
5:15 PM – 5:25 PM Discussion
5:25 PM – 5:35 PM Conclusions
 
 
Abstracts:

Christophe Geiger and Bernd Justin Jütte – Copyright as an Access Right: Concretizing Positive Obligations for Rightholders to Ensure the Exercise of User Rights.
 
While rightholders have long enjoyed protection of their works and subject matter through exclusive rights, the CJEU only recently emphasized that users of such copyright subject matter enjoy rights to perform specific uses. These rights exist to enable uses covered by limitations and exceptions (L&E) that are rooted in and justified by fundamental rights (FR) and the function of copyright. The idea of the social contract underlying the copyright bargain implies reciprocal obligations: any grant of exclusive rights must entail legal duties for rightholders to fulfill the core function of copyright, guarantee the exercise of competing fundamental rights, and preserve societal values. EU Member States thus incur positive obligations to realize these rights. This paper explores the positive duties that must be imposed on rightholders to realize user rights. To ensure that copyright serves as a means for accessing culture and education, and as a catalyst for research and innovation, the effective exercise of user rights must be guaranteed. It is therefore essential to ensure access to copyrighted works under fair and reasonable conditions. Certain beneficiaries who play central roles in the exercise of user rights (libraries, public archives, universities) must be put in a position to enable the exercise of these rights and to function as access points for a broader public. Initial access—on fair terms and unimpeded by technological means or contractual restrictions—is therefore an essential condition to exercise and to benefit from an L&E granted by copyright law.
This paper explores ways to overcome the access problem and make user rights a reality in the digital world. Given that copyright is an access right, current copyright rules must be applied in a way that facilitates access. First, existing L&E must be interpreted to create positive obligations for rightholders. Second, fully realizing the access rationale of copyright requires legislative reform, particularly with a view to enabling digital uses as equivalent functions to analog uses. Fulfilling the social contract that underpins copyright law requires an interpretation of existing rules that is consistent with the Fundamental Rights, as well as changes to substantive copyright law and a fair balance between rights and obligations.
 
The paper is forthcoming in GRUR Int.- Journal of European and International IP Law 2024, Issue 11, and is available on ssrn: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4949672.
 
Francesca Di Lazzaro – Sustainable Copyright: A roadmap to fair and equitable access to education through Generative AI.
 
The paper highlights the importance of a copyright framework in enabling access to education regardless of class, gender, and language for the implementation of SDG No. 4, and underscores the role that Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) systems can play in this regard. The need for universal access to education is urgent: studies have shown that the gap in educational access between women and men, and between the poor and the rich, still needs to be closed. In the spirit of addressing such issues, SDG No. 4 sets some targets to be achieved to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” Achieving this goal requires that educational materials be universally and easily accessible, available in various languages (including minority languages), and potentially free of charge for students. Within the context of this roadmap to sustainable copyright, this paper puts forward a solution based on the use of Gen AI and discusses a proposal for reforming copyright law to achieve SDG No. 4. In particular, the paper assesses the relevant copyright legislative framework and analyzes the instances in which copyright law provisions can limit access to materials for subsequent reproductions and elaborations, potentially also for educational purposes, primarily in the EU and through an instrumental comparison with the legislative framework in the UK and in the US. The paper concludes that the current legislative framework is inadequate in its present form, and that the copyright system should structurally support the promotion of education. Based on the above considerations, the paper advocates for the establishment of a new system of limitations and exceptions to implement SDG 4, enabling access to education regardless of class, gender, and language. The second step is the subsequent creation of an open repository (which will be called the “essential knowledge” database) where materials and their elaborations – broadly understood and including translations and image-to-text conversions – should flow and be easily accessible.
 
The paper anticipates the conclusions of a PhD thesis that asserts the importance of access to materials for educational purposes for achieving sustainable development and highlights the role that copyright can play in this regard, starting with an analysis of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a theoretical framework.
 
Christophe Geiger and Vincenzo Iaia - Towards an Independent EU Regulator for Copyright Issues of Generative AI: What Role for the AI Office?
 
The widespread success of generative AI services presents a new copyright conundrum. Around the world, there is debate about whether training General-Purpose AI models (GPAIM) with copyright-protected works for commercial purposes falls within the exclusive rights of copyright holders. In the EU, the recent AI Act (in its last adopted version) appears to refer to the legal framework of the text and data mining exceptions in Directive 790/2019/EU (the CDSM Directive) to address the issue. According to Article 4.3 of the CDSM Directive, copyright holders can opt out of the exception and thus reserve their content from being used for the extraction of their intellectual works to improve machine learning performance. There are currently many uncertainties regarding who (is it the author or the holder of derivative rights? Do CMOs have the mandate to do so?) and how (what exactly is a machine-readable format as required by the exception?) to exercise the opt-out.
This paper compares the foreseeable promises and limitations of the AI Office in ensuring sustainable creativity in Europe following the tectonic shift that Generative AI has brought to the already fragile balance of the copyright system. It argues that the complexity of copyright issues in the digital environment should prompt a reflection on the proper institutional framework regulating EU copyright law. To this end, it has been proposed that the EU consider establishing a European Copyright Agency with the broader task of ensuring the proper functioning of the European market for copyright-protected works (Geiger/Mangal, 2022). In this perspective, the agency would operate in consultation with the AI Office to address the emerging demand for intellectual works to train machine learning models and coordinate/cooperate with the various sectoral regulators set up recently in the various legislative interventions (Digital Services Act, Data Act, European Media Freedom Act) with regard to copyright matters in the online world, thus ensuring coherence and transparency for the parties involved.
 <br > The paper will appear in the upcoming issue of the Journal Auteurs et Médias and will be available on ssrn: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4914938.