Copyright for Faculty and Staff

Generative Artificial Intelligence offers opportunities to enhance teaching, learning, and research in post-secondary education. For instance, Dr Libing Wang at UNESCO mentioned that AI can help make education more accessible and inclusive for learners with diverse needs by offering tailored learning experiences (UNESCO, 2024). However, AI in education brings both benefits and risks so it is important to consider them carefully and critically (UNESCO, 2024).

One of the risks to consider is potential copyright infringement. Since many millions of copyrighted works are used to train the dataset of generative AI tools, there are copyright implications for both developers and end users of these tools. 

There remain many unknowns and uncertainties in copyright legislation related to Generative AI. Some of the questions people are eager to know the answer to include: Whether it is copyright compliant for AI developers to use copyrighted materials to train their datasets? What aspects of an AI-generated work, if any, can receive copyright protection? 

There are several copyright cases against AI companies. For example, The New York Times has claimed that OpenAI and Microsoft scraped their articles on the Internet to train ChatGPT and Copilot (see this opinion article). A group of artists is suing Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt for allegedly using their images without permission (read CBR's article). 

The Canadian and US governments have received a lot of pressure from the public and industries to address the myriad of legal and ethical issues related to AI. Many groups including the Association of Research Libraries have also advocated the benefits of artificial intelligence for promoting creativity and innovations. As Brigitte Vézina (2023) from Creative Commons mentioned, “copyright is just one lens through which to consider AI.”