CIPIL Seminar: 'Algorithmic Fair Use'

Speaker

Dan L Burk Chancellor’s Professor of Law - University of California, Irvine

Abstract

Legal governance is becoming increasingly reliant on data collection and algorithmic data processing. In the area of copyright, on-line protection of digitized works is frequently mediated by algorithmic enforcement systems intended to purge illicit content and limit the liability of YouTube, Facebook, and other content platforms.

But unauthorized content is not necessarily illicit content. Many unauthorized digital postings may claim legitimacy under statutory exceptions such as the legal balancing standard known as fair use. Such exceptions such exist to ameliorate the negative effects of copyright on public discourse, personal enrichment, and artistic creativity. Consequently, it may seem desirable to incorporate fair use metrics into copyright policing algorithms, both to protect against automated over-deterrence, and to inform users of their compliance with copyright law. Professor Burk will examine the prospects for algorithmic mediation of copyright exceptions, warning that the design values embedded in algorithms will inevitably become embedded in public behavior and consciousness. Thus, algorithmic fair use carries with it the very real possibility of habituating new media participants to its own biases, and so progressively altering the fair use standard it attempts to embody.

About the speaker

Dan L. Burk is Chancellor’s Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a founding member of the law faculty. An internationally prominent authority on issues related to high technology, he lectures, teaches, and writes in the areas of patent, copyright, electronic commerce, and biotechnology law. He is the author of numerous papers on the legal and societal impact of new technologies, including articles on Internet regulation, on the structure of the patent system, and on the economic analysis of intellectual property law. He holds a B.S. in Microbiology (1985) from Brigham Young University, an M.S. in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry (1987) from Northwestern University, a J.D. (1990) from Arizona State University, and a J.S.M. (1994) from Stanford University. He has served as a legal advisor to a variety of private, governmental, and intergovernmental organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union Committee on Patent Policy and the OECD Committee on Consumer Protection.