From a corporate perspective, the main purpose of compliance is to limit the risk of sanction and loss. In order to achieve this goal, we need to know and apply policies, procedures, standards and the law while also securing our assets from harm, including our intellectual property rights (IPRs).
Awareness of IPRs is essential for several reasons, including:
- preventing our ideas from being stolen;
- safeguarding the assets and profitability of the Company;
- giving the Company a commercial advantage over its competition;
- minimising the chance of an inadvertent breach; and
- limiting our company's exposure to damages for the breach of IPRs.
The use of AI for commercial purposes has the potential to affect both our IPRs and result in a breach of the IPRs of others.
Some AI systems are able to autonomously generate work, leading to the question of who might hold the intellectual property in AI-generated work. Furthermore, AI systems learn from data, and this data may be protected by IPRs.
For the purposes of simplicity, from this point on, we will focus on copyright, but it is important to remember that some of these issues could also affect other IPRs, especially designs and possibly patents.