The Wild West of AI and IP Rights
This Week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I speak with Allison Gaul, who is the legal counsel at Boston Consulting Group. She is responsible for evaluating the digital products in terms of intellectual property strategy, legal risk, and value creation. She is a former or recovering patent attorney. She still advises BCG on patent matters, but at this time she is not drafting or prosecuting patent applications. I ask Gaul what she thinks are the most important legal issues in today’s IP world. “I feel that right now, with AI developing so rapidly and Web 3.0 catching up to it and Quantum coming in hard behind it, it’s almost like we’re racing in an AI horse race. Then there’s the regulatory patchwork that is just exploding around the world from an AI perspective as well as a data standpoint. What is today’s hot issue?” Like, what is today’s hot issue.”
“One is data control. Gaul explained that input data is the basis for rights and integrity. Output data, security, privacy and jurisdictional components are all important. We’re seeing more jurisdictions impose restrictions on what is allowed to enter and leave their jurisdiction, what can be stored, and what must be validated by the government. Maybe it’s not the weights, but the model. It could be the weights but not the model… The training data aren’t available. Dual licensing is not a new concept. Red Hat and Oracle have done this very well in the past. But there’s something a little bit insidious maybe about the way that it’s happening now in this sort of AI arms race and rush to market share, where people are putting stuff out there just to try to gobble up as much user base as they can, and then doing a little bit of a switcheroo.”
The third and final thing that Gaul identifies as being constantly top of mind is the overall speed of AI development.
Returning to the beginning of her list, I seed the conversation by acknowledging the privacy concerns that have grown over the last decade, highlighted most prominently by the Europeans. And now with a company like 23andMe going bankrupt there are concerns about what will become of all the data they have been giving and have accumulated.
“I think the ownership of data and the use rights for data are actually one of the paramount questions in innovation right now,” Gaul said. “
every innovation needs data. Whether it’s quantum apps, whether metaverse, web 3.0, or different types of AI (not just generative), everyone needs data.”
We’ve been seeing this real escalation in privacy protections across the world for some time now,” Gaul explained. “But this year, we are actually seeing the EU say they’re planning to simplify GDPR. Some other jurisdictions have said they’re going back off a little because they feel that it’s stifling the innovation within the AI Race.” “But, I think that what will happen is that, as these larger AI firms come under more and greater legal scrutiny, and more and greater fire, and the people become more and angrier online about the way their data is treated, or how they are not able to fully understand how these things work, we’ll start to see more people relying on smaller tools.” There are hundreds, hundreds, and hundreds of new AI companies. “[E]I agree Gaul’s assessment and I believe we’ll have a few very large companies who will provide the backbone for future AI tools. These large AI companies will be very adept at machine learning, and at consuming massive amounts of data. We will then likely see silos of knowledge being established. Small companies will dominate these silos or niches, as they operate in an industry niche that they are very familiar with. We are already seeing smaller companies develop specific tools in the IP space, which we are familiar with. These tools are better for a specialized use because they know the IP industry, and what it wants and needs. “I do think that will solve some of our IP issues, because it will make it easier to understand the implications for licensing a piece IP to use with a specific app, program, or model,” Gaul explained. “I think that will alleviate some of our challenges, not necessarily around protecting these things, but about how we manage licensing and attribution when we have specific tools that use them in specific ways.” You can listen to the entire podcast by downloading it wherever you get your podcasts from, visiting IPWatchdog Unleashed at Buzzsprout, or watching the conversation via the IPWatchdog Youtube channel.
