Photo Credit: Prof Pina D'Agostino

Prof Giuseppina D’Agostino is the Founder & Director of IP Osgoode, the IP Intensive Program, and the IP Innovation Clinic, the Editor-in-Chief for the IPilogue and the Intellectual Property Journal, and an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School. She is also very proud of her new book!

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I am excited to share that I just published a collection on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the law, Leading Legal Disruption: Artificial Intelligence and a Toolkit for Lawyers and the Law (Thomson Reuters 2021). Co-edited with Dr. Aviv Gaon and Carole Piovesan, the book provides a provocative analysis on the emerging terrain of AI and how it interrogates various areas of the law. The book, that features a foreword from the Hon. Marshall Rothstein (formerly of the Supreme Court of Canada), is an international collaboration of thought leaders in AI, with contributors from Canada, the USA, Europe and Israel. Issues discussed include intellectual property, privacy, contract law, regulation, governance, ethics, business and more. Importantly, such issues merit a toolkit of practical and international perspectives as they are increasingly complex and ajurisdictional. ����

In many ways this book is also a reflection of Osgoode’s strengths in AI. My co-editors, Dr. Aviv Gaon, Director at IDC Herzliya of Experiential Programs, is a PhD graduate (class of 2019) publishing several other books on AI and emerging technology, and Carole Piovesan (class of 2009) has co-founded her own firm, INQ Law. ��I am myself an LL. B graduate from Osgoode (class of 1999), eventually returned as faculty to found and run IP Osgoode and I am currently co-chairing the 91��ɫ AI & Society Task Force, among many other initiatives in this space.

I am particularly thankful to the Osgoode JD students who provided helpful research assistance: Elif Babaoglu, Daniel Joseph, Joseph Simile, Rachel Marcus, Christopher Tsuji, and Julianna Felendzer.

I am most grateful for the enthusiastic endorsements by Prof David Vaver (Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Osgoode; Emeritus Professor of Intellectual Property & Information Technology Law, University of Oxford), Prof Jane Ginsburg (Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia University School of Law), Justice Michael Manson (Federal Court of Canada), and Dan Bereskin (Partner, Bereskin & Parr LLP) all which can be read on the back cover.

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I particularly like this one, inspired by an AI and suggestive of our youth, our future ultimately grappling with AI and other emerging technology, that will iterate in every generation.

I look forward to hearing from you on your thoughts on the book (and the cover!). You may order your copy��here.

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While theoretically superior in terms of public safety, autonomous cars and advanced algorithms bring up a type of mechanical morality -- in decisions to be made between life and death of pedestrians, occupants, or property damage. Determined by humans, these ethical ‘what-ifs’ translate into potentially tangible scenarios; extensive hypotheticals and their implications are not a question of existence, but of approach. While coded ethics, according to Noah J Goodall, a University of Virginia research scientist in transportation, will have “situations that the programmers often will not have considered [and] the public doesn’t expect superhuman wisdom but rather rational justification,” what counts as ‘ethical’ is subjective . Factors in ethics go beyond death toll. Janet Fleetwood, from the�� Department of Community Health and Prevention, Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University, how age, assigned societal value, injuries vs. fatalities, future consequences on quality of life, personal risk, and the moral weight of killing against a ‘passive’ death all contribute to the problem.

The legal framework for autonomous vehicles does not yet exist, but the laws and policies that govern automated cars must not derive from their creators.��Doing so would place considerable responsibility on the programmers of automated vehicles to ensure their control algorithms collectively produce actions that are legally and ethically acceptable to humans. The ethical decisions must be uniform for the sake of simplifying liability and establishing an optimal process for future programming. Negligence, the current “governing liability for car accidents,” will expand to the field of programming. Consequently, it is important to in the cases of accidents.

Ethics being prescribed solely by manufacturers may result in an arms-race to best serve the consumer’s interests. The technique of marketing reveals itself in ethical ambiguity of preferential treatment of the consumer; instead of being ethically neutral, an autonomous car may be marketed to show strict deference to the consumer, diluting ethics into a protectionist game. Conversely, programming an automated car to slavishly follow the law might also result in dangerous and unforeseen consequence. Extensive research and decision-making experiments explored in a non-profit based model may simplify the scope of the problem; instead of imagining how to market the product, discussions over autonomous cars become purely performative. Consideration from multiple stake-holders such as consumers, corporations, government institutions, organizations and others may be necessary to construct clear and stringent ethical guidelines that is necessary in the implementation of automated vehicles into society, which requires extensive efforts to reach a uniform conclusion. However, ethical dilemmas regarding control algorithms that determine the actions of automated vehicles will inevitably be subject to philosophical issues such as “the trolley problem” — a no-win hypothetical situation in which a person witnessing a runaway trolley would either do nothing and allow it to hit several people or, by pulling a lever, divert it, killing only one person. In such circumstances, there is simply no right answer and this make ethical guidelines difficult to construct.

While one may propose a utilitarian approach should be adopted for the sake of simplicity, questions such as would humanity be comfortable having a computer decide the fate of their life -- and what if the machine’s philosophical understanding extends beyond dire incidents would undoubtedly arise. Professor Azim Shariff of University of California that found that respondents generally agreed that a car should, in the case of an inevitable crash, kill the fewest number of people possible regardless of whether they were passengers or people outside of the car. However, this raises the question of, would a customer buy a car in which they and their family member(s) would be sacrificed for the benefit of the public?

To delineate the complexity of the situation, Fleetwood multiple hypothetical situations regarding moral preferences to participants. The study concluded 76% of participants favored a utilitarian approach in which the maximum number of lives were saved, yet participants were reluctant in purchasing a vehicle that sacrificed its own passengers. Understandably, consumers maintain a bias towards their own life; few would desire a product that chooses to sacrifice its owner.

Perhaps, legal ethics of automated vehicles should not exist in human management but rather in a machine’s own ability to learn. This is known as machine learning, where the program provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience. Machine learning focuses on developing computer programs that can access data and use it learn for themselves without human intervention. Static programming arrives at pre-determined ethical conclusions, while machine learning generates its own decisions, distinct from purely human determined ethics. While introducing an objective or impartial arbiter to complex situations would be desirable, questions on how accurate its judgments may arise. Scholars propose to model human behaviour to ensure that cars, rather than behaving better, behave exactly like us, and thus impulsively, rather than rationally. One by Leon R. Sütfeld et al. state “simple models based on one-dimensional value-of-life scales are suited to describe human ethical behaviour” in these circumstances and as such would be preferable to pre-programmed decision-making criteria, which might ultimately appear too complex, insufficiently transparent, and difficult to predict. This solution regarding machine-learning to mimic human decision-making appears to be oriented towards an essential aspect of social acceptance; the uniformity of robots with human behaviour. Therefore, instead of regulating automated vehicles through ambiguous ethical guidelines, they will base their decisions through humanistic thinking while still lowering accident rate compared to human drivers. Nevertheless, other issues still exist; questions of whether this technology is achievable in the future and who should be held responsible for automated incidents in the context of machine learning. Regardless, whether the guidelines for automated vehicles arise from policy regulators or machine-learning, society needs to embrace that autonomous cars will debut on the market in the coming years, and work towards addressing the floodgate of concerns for wider applications including life-or-death accidents.

Rui Shen is an IPilogue Editor and a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

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What is Kopimism? It is a religion based on the philosophical belief that “Information holds a value, in itself and in what it contains, and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organisation and its members.”

, co-founder of the Kopimism movement and the organization’s chair , were recently interviewed on the CBC Radio. In their respective interviews, both Gerson and Nipe explained that the process of becoming formally recognized by the government Agency as a religion was difficult because they had to demonstrate that Kopimism was in fact a faith. This required a showing of rituals and ‘spiritual language’ in their application. In true form, the Kopimists ‘borrowed’ the theological language of other organized religions to satisfy this requirement - although due to the fact that Kopimism is not focused on humans, concepts of heaven, hell or afterlife do not exist.

What then are the basic tenets of Kopimism? The claims that knowledge, the circulation of knowledge and the act of copying are all sacred. Gerson proclaimed that “copying is holy and information is holy”, while Nipe believes that copying is central to life. Nipe drew parallels between natural evolution and societal evolution. He reasoned that when a child is born, DNA, language and other information is passed on naturally through copying and mimicking, thus copying an inherent and fundamental right.

The raison d’être of establishing Kopimism as a religion is to be guaranteed immunity from acts that could otherwise infringe copyright laws pursuant to Chapter 1, Article 2 of the . In a 2005 , the defendant Åke Green (a religious figure) was acquitted for hate speech on the basis that the freedom of religion and expression. The Court held that although he was not absolved from liability for his actions, the guarantee granted by the European Convention on Human Rights coupled with the history of case law demonstrated that the charges would not be upheld in a European Court in his particular circumstances. This is not to say that the acts of the Church or its members would be protected in the same manner in the event of copyright infringement.

When questioned about his position on copyright laws, Nipe argued that copyright law, unlike the right to copy is neither ethical nor moral. He proclaimed that the livelihood of creators and authors should not be supported via copyright laws because copyright is not a god given right. Nipe further commented that creation is not founded on ‘thin air’ and that as a result access to creation (and thus information) should not be restricted.

Kopimism is not formally recognized as a religion in Canada, nor is it likely that it ever will be. Even if it were recognized, it is unlikely that the guarantee to ‘freedom of conscience and religion’ would override the in this case, or that such a religion would otherwise pass the two step Section 1 Charter limitation test articulated in .

Both the and the indicate that the main tenets of the movement are the right to take [access] the information, remix it and re-release it without restriction: “All people should have access to all information produced. A gigantic Boosting Knowledge for humanity.”

Remixing and re-releasing copyrighted works lawfully obtained would not necessarily be considered infringement based on the proposed reforms to the Copyright Act under , since exceptions such as the ‘youtube’, parody and satire exceptions would be permitted, alongside Fair Dealing. However the Bill also endorses the enforcement of technological protection measures (TPM’s) which may serve to prevent unauthorized open access to copyrighted materials.

There are currently just over 10 Kopimism churches around the world - including the one in Canada – although the original Swedish church is the only one formally recognized as a religion. To become a Kopimist, one simply needs to read and agree to the values posted on the website and then sign up:

“The community of kopimi requires no formal membership. You just have to feel a calling to worship what is the holiest of the holiest, information and copy. To do this, we organize kopyactings – religious services – where the Kopimists share information with eachother through copying and remix. Copy and seed.”

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The Church currently has just over 4000 members.

Courtney Doagoo is a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law.

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