SINGAPORE – Can technology companies use copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence (AI) models? How can copyrights be protected when this happens?
Ways to foster greater accountability and certainty regarding copyrights when training AI are some of the issues that the Government is seeking feedback on with the Aug 26 launch of a public consultation on AI’s impact on copyrights and patents, and how they should evolve in the wake of the technology.
It comes amid a flurry of lawsuits filed globally by rights holders who allege that many technology companies have infringed their copyrights. This includes using copyrighted books, news articles, images and music to train AI models without permission from or paying the rights holders.
The Singapore public consultation by the Ministry of Law and Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) was announced by Minister for Law Edwin Tong at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property held at Marina Bay Sands Expo and Convention Centre during the Singapore IP Week.
Courts overseas have arrived at different conclusions on whether copyrights are infringed when copyrighted works are used to train AI without permission, depending on factors like the details of each case.
For example, in the United States, a judge ruled that AI firm Anthropic, which developed the Claude AI chatbot, had to pay thousands of affected authors US$1.5 billion (S$1.94 billion) for infringing their copyrights when the company used millions of pirated e-books to train its AI without consent from the authors or paying them.
However, the same judge found that Anthropic did not infringe copyrights when it trained its AI by scanning pages sliced off old physical books the company had bought before later destroying and recycling them. This destructive scanning was found to be transformative and considered fair use of the purchased books, which included rare and out-of-print titles.
Speaking at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property, Tong, who is also Singapore’s Second Minister for Home Affairs, said the issue of whether copyrighted works can legally be used to train AI will increasingly crop up.
This is because AI is becoming used more widely as a creative tool, more powerful in how it can be used and needs more content to be trained on, he explained.
As such, the authenticity of creation is increasingly being questioned.
“Courts and IP offices around the world broadly agree that an author must be a human being. But where do we draw the line? What kinds of acts or decisions made by human prompters demonstrate sufficient creativity?” said Tong.
While there is a desire to promote innovation and not stifle it, the rights of creators need to be carefully considered and balanced too, said Tong, noting that it is not good in the long term if creative works can be used on a large scale by AI without a framework that considers the works’ creation.
These are issues that the Government wants to examine with stakeholders, especially those in creative industries, he added.
Tong noted that the rise in litigation cases related to copyrighted works and AI suggest that a number of practical questions still remain, regarding how rights holders should protect their work if they do not want it to be used for AI training.
The solution may be to deploy more technical measures. But if this is done, the Government must then consider how less well-resourced rights holders may be supported.
Tong said the Government “will carefully study the global landscape, and consider an approach which gives us the right balance”.
The public consultation is also seeking feedback on how existing principles on how existing principles on inventions should apply when AI is used in the invention process. Feedback is also being sought on the impact of the large-scale publication of AI-generated technical disclosures, which are details of trade secrets and proprietary know-how.
Details on the public consultation can be found at go.gov.sg/ai-ip2026 and the deadline for submissions is 5pm on Oct 22.
Tong also announced other initiatives to bolster IP, including a set of guidelines on how to valuate intangible assets. This will help build greater consistency and confidence in how such assets are valued.
They were developed by the Institute of Valuers and Appraisers Singapore, with support from the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority, IPOS, and industry partners.