December marks not only the beginning of the festive season, but also the University of Glasgow winter graduation season. On 6th December the School of Law graduates received their diplomas and best wishes for their future endeavours. As usual, members of the CREATe team were happy to partake in the celebrations and to raise a glass of bubbly to our excellent LLM students during a small gathering in a refreshed CREATe Hub.
CREATe leads the LLM in Intellectual Property & Digital Economy, offered by the Law School at the University of Glasgow. The programme provides students with a unique opportunity to explore the rapidly developing digital environment through the lens of intellectual property, and to engage with the current policy discussions in which CREATe remains an active participant. All IP LLM students are required to submit a master dissertation on the topic of their choosing. They work on their dissertations independently, under a limited guidance of a supervisor.
Since 2021, CREATe offers authors of excellent postgraduate research an opportunity to publish their LLM dissertations in the CREATe Working Papers series. The “Outstanding LLM Dissertations” allow us to showcase the best work of our LLM students, reward their efforts, and inspire our new students when preparing their own dissertations in the future.
Following nominations by the IP LLM supervisors, the CREATe teaching team selected two LLM dissertations submitted in the 2023/24 academic year to be published in the Working Paper series. The authors of the outstanding dissertations are:
Panagiotis Lampropoulos: AI Enhancement and the Right of Integrity – Rehashing the 1980s Colorization Debate
Lucy Cunningham: Access to heritage: A comparative study of Italy and the UK from a fundamental rights perspective
We are excited to bring these two excellent pieces of research to the wider academic community. You can read the abstracts and access the full text of the Outstanding LLM Dissertations 2024 below.
Apart from being an author of an excellent dissertation, Lucy Cunningham has also received the prize for the best student on the LLM in Intellectual Property and the Digital Economy programme for 2023/24 academic year.
In our celebrations at CREATe offices we were joined by the alumni of CopyrightX, an affiliated Harvard Law School course, which allows our IP LLM students to deepen their understanding of US copyright law. Students received their diplomas and warmest congratulations from the CREATe team.
Once again, many congratulations to Panagiotis and Lucy and all students who graduated on Friday!
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AI Enhancement and the Right of Integrity – Rehashing the 1980s Colorization Debate
Panagiotis Lampropoulos
CREATe Working Paper 2024/10
Abstract
With the rise and prominence of AI art and its profitability, it is clear that production companies and streaming platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime will look to ‘enhance’ works to which they own the rights, using those tools. While a plethora of works regarding AI in the IP space has been written recently when discussing authorship, and granting AI a legal personality, moral rights are often brushed over. Despite the novelty of AI tools, there is a long history of technological enhancements made on films with little legal resolution under Anglo-American legal systems. Therefore, this paper will, through a historical study of the colorization conflict in the US during the 1980s and its failure to provide directors with a satisfactory right, and through comparison with Continental European jurisdictions with a stronger moral rights tradition, seek to reform the right of integrity in light of this practice. However, it will also consider a balance between protecting directors from unnecessary AI enhancements to their films and the encouragement of the use of AI tools to efficiently restore films which would otherwise remain lost.
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Access to heritage: A comparative study of Italy and the UK from a fundamental rights perspective
Lucy Cunningham
CREATe Working Paper 2024/11
Abstract
The objective of this work is to analyse the problem of restricted access to cultural heritage by current legislation, and to propose recommendations for reform to mediate the problem. The issues surrounding access to cultural heritage will be investigated from a fundamental rights perspective, with a comparative analysis between the UK, and Italy (which lends itself to discussion of the European Union). To exemplify the challenges to access to cultural heritage, this research focuses on the case of digital reproductions of public domain cultural heritage. This research is motivated by the evolving landscape of the cultural heritage sector, and the legal frameworks governing access to and dissemination of cultural heritage in the digital age.
A fundamental rights approach has been taken to highlight how important it is to ensure access to cultural heritage. There has been a steady flow of research looking at copyright law from a fundamental rights perspective, but much of this has focused on the relationship between copyright law and freedom of expression. This study instead focuses on the fundamental right to cultural participation, rephrased as the ‘right to access to cultural heritage’ in this research to encompass any related cultural rights. This aims to form a new perspective on copyright law and its relationship with fundamental rights. Through this lens copyright law is largely satisfactory – Article 14 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive is a great example of a legal provision that champions access to cultural heritage. The issue instead lies with other laws which can be used by Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and other cultural heritage institutions to restrict access to cultural heritage for, for example, their own economic gain. This is particularly a problem when access to cultural heritage is restricted by laws or other legal measures when copyright law would otherwise allow access, use, and enjoyment of them, such as those that are in the public domain.
As a consequence, certain copyright provisions in the UK and EU should be reformed. Copyright non-overridability provisions for both the UK and EU legislators are proposed to be implemented into the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, respectively. Given that legislative reform is highly challenging to accomplish, other ways in which access to cultural heritage can be aided, such as guidance to the judiciary and increased funding for GLAMs, will be mentioned. Ultimately, however, it is argued that legislative reform is essential for championing access to cultural heritage and upholding fundamental rights within the copyright system in the digital age.