Creative orgs call for copyright protections to be added to AI bill

Organizations representing Canada’s creative industries are calling on MPs to add copyright provisions to Bill C-27, in order to protect creators’ content, likeness, and reputation in the age of AI. On Monday, members of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), L’Association nationale des éditeurs de livres (ANEL), the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE), the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC), and Music Canada, testified before the House industry committee to share their views on the Digital Charter Implementation Act. Their arguments took aim at the bill’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), saying it does not do enough to protect the rights of Canadian creators. Transparency around the data used to train AI models is key, said the organizations, who all expressed concern around processes of web scraping and data mining, which play a core role in the development of AI systems. Recognizing existing copyright rules — and the department of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development’s (ISED) recent consultation on AI and copyright — CDCE’s executive director Marie-Julie Desrochers stated that the Canadian Copyright Act “does not need to be modernized in any major way to protect rights holders in response to developments in AI.” However, due to the lack of transparency regarding how AI models are currently being trained, she argued that it is ineffective. By requiring developers to publicly share detailed summaries of the training data they use, particularly that which is protected by copyright, Bill C-27 can fix this issue. “It's very difficult for rights holders to know when their works have been used without their consent in training AI models,” said DGC’s national executive director Dave Forget. ANEL’s director of legal affairs, Stéphanie Hénault, agreed. She noted that the Copyright Act provides rights to the victims of infringement, but argued that, “upstream,” Bill C-27 should at least explicitly recognize the need to respect intellectual property. “Otherwise the Canadian rights market is likely to be even more negatively affected, while systems are developed and deployed in an opaque, unfair, and illegal manner,” she said. Other organizations were less confident in the strength of the Copyright Act. “The Copyright Act is fundamentally biased against performers by not ascribing a moral right to their work,” said ACTRA president Eleanor Noble, joined by national executive director Marie Kelly. According to a submission from ACTRA to Canadian Heritage and ISED during the recent copyright and AI consultation, “moral rights are the right to claim to be identified as the performer, subject to exceptions, and the right to object to any distortion, mutilation or other modification that would be prejudicial to the performer’s reputation, taking into account the nature of the audiovisual fixations.” Noble noted that musicians already have similar protections. She urged the committee to protect Canadian audiovisual performers “either through this bill or with haste elsewhere,” expressing worries that she and other performers have about their likeness being scanned and used without their consent. Transparency and the recognition of intellectual property are recommendations consistent with the European Union’s AI Act, the organizations emphasized, which was approved by the Council of the EU on Feb. 2. Some of the organizations also called for changes to the bill’s definition of harm, which currently only includes physical or psychological harm to an individual, damage to an individual’s property, or economic loss to an individual. “There is no doubt the damage to a performer’s reputation means real and tangible loss for our careers,” said Noble. “Sadly, reputational harm is not currently encompassed by Bill C 27.” She listed several recent examples of ACTRA members who had their likeness manipulated by AI without their consent. One of the victims included a minor whose voice was uploaded to a text-to-speech website, allowing her voice to say “crude, R-rated things.” A video game actor also had their voice and in-game character manipulated by AI to say “obscene things and to perform sexual acts” without their knowledge or consent. Recommendations to label AI generated images and videos were echoed by Music Canada CEO Patrick Rogers. He called for the bill to declare non-consensual deepfakes illegal, countering debates around their protection under free speech law. “Putting your words in my mouth is not free speech,” stated Rogers. He also argued that they should not be considered parody either. “They don't mimic with deliberate exaggeration for comic effect,” he explained, “they are done to deceive, misinform, and steal one person's character for the advantage of another.” — Reporting by Phalen Tynes-MacDonald at pcreed@thewirereport.ca.

Creative orgs call for copyright protections to be added to AI bill

Broadcast | February 13, 2024

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