Responsible innovation involving AI systems must take place in a regulatory environment that respects fundamental rights, including copyright, and creates the conditions for trust in the digital economy to flourish.
We note that the global publishing industry has been an active contributor to the deployment and development of AI based products, services and platforms, and of machine learning technologies. Technologies that might be included under a concept of AI cover multiple areas in the publishing industry, such as machine generated content (e.g. books, snippets), editing services (e.g. data checking), automated peer-review services to facilitate human peer-reviewing, and optimized search and delivery services (e.g. reader recommendations, enhanced search features, cross-references for research reliability).
The consultation paper makes clear that AI and the IoT are in their early days of development. There are, understandably, more questions than answers surrounding these technologies, and further study will be needed in order to make informed, evidence-based copyright policy decisions that take into account the rights of both users and copyright holders, and are in keeping with Canada’s international treaty obligations.