We are delighted to host Monica Westin for the Inaugural Lecture of our new LLM in Technology Law and Regulation.
The new programme is one of three LLM programmes offered by the School of Law at the University of Glasgow and led by CREATe. Alongside the LLMs in Intellectual Property & Digital Economy and in International Competition Law & Policy, the Tech Law LLM reflects CREATe’s new structure, which is anchored in intellectual property, competition and information technology law.
As we are all witnessing, information technology is becoming an integral part of our everyday lives, with artificial intelligence, big data and the platform economy continuing to evolve at a rapid pace. This transformation is creating new legal and regulatory challenges, ranging from privacy concerns to the safety of AI systems. This new programme aims to provide students with interdisciplinary expertise in law and technology, preparing them to critically assess and address emerging issues in this dynamic field.
By discussing copyright as infrastructure in the age of AI, Monica Westin addresses some of these new challenges. The lecture is taking place on 28th October at 5:30pm in the Advanced Research Centre (room 237ABC) and is part of the University of Glasgow’s Data Science and AI Festival (27-29 October).
We are also organising other exciting workshops and activities as part of the Festival.
To attend this inaugural lecture, please register here.
Monica Westin – Copyright as Infrastructure in the Age of AI: Coordination failures, maintenance debt, and practical remedies
This talk explores copyright as infrastructure in the age of AI: the shared, networked, and interoperable systems that lower transaction costs, enable scale, shape participation, and, following Chachra, embody “material expressions of shared commitments.” This perspective illuminates two copyright infrastructure failure modes central to the scholarly knowledge economy. First, coordination failures: cross-border operation without global standards generates friction, exclusion, and unreliable signals. Second, maintenance debt exposed by LLMs and generative AI: brittle rights metadata, unclear licensing for machine uses, patchy exceptions, and weak integrity/usage indicators. The paper advances practical remedies grounded in the principles of infrastructural maintenance: modern, interoperable rights registries and identifiers; programmatic and collective licensing models for computational use; transparent, routinely updated exceptions and policies; and fit-for-purpose metrics that recognise quality and stewardship over volume. Treating copyright as infrastructure foregrounds coordination and maintenance as prerequisites for an equitable, scalable, and trustworthy research ecosystem.
Stay tuned for our Public Lectures and research updates by subscribing to our newsletter.