On 13.01.2020, Zhang Kaiye and Johannes Kevekordes gave lectures on current topics relating to the GoAL project to students of the special subject area “Information, Telecommunications and Media Law”.
First of all, Zhang Kaiye, a doctoral student at the School of Law of Tsinghua University in China and guest researcher in the civil law department of ITM, presented a possible legal perspective on the copyright protection of works created by artificial intelligence to the participants of the Information Law lecture. In this context, he first dealt with a recent ruling of the Beijing Internet Court, in which the judges in the underlying case did not assume that a work infringes copyright because it was created by AI software. In particular, the distinction between the originality of a work and the quality of the work is crucial. A work created by AI can also be original, whereas the quality of a work presupposes that the work was created by a human being. Zhang Kaiye then discussed the guiding principles of the judgment, in particular the incentive function of copyright.
The lecture was followed by a lively discussion with the students about the purposes of copyright protection.
In the second lecture, Johannes Kevekordes, research assistant in the civil law department of ITM and doctoral student of Prof. Dr. Hoeren, dealt with the model of data ownership as a possible new approach to the allocation of data. He pointed out that data are non-rival objects of use, since a variety of uses are possible without interfering with each other. This property as a non-rival usage object excludes the construction of data ownership. Instead, the question arises as to whether the model of data ownership is more appropriate to the nature of data. In contrast to ownership, which represents the ideal type of absolute law, the link between ownership and the actual factual situation could mean less interference with the freedom of information. This link would at least make an application to data appear possible.
The ITM would like to thank the two speakers for the exciting insights they were able to provide on current issues of information law, and the nearly 100 listeners from academia and business for the lively discussion.
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