The Role of Bots in Safeguarding Intellectual Property
You may be a prolific blogger on Facebook, a content manager of a popular website, or a producer of fun videos on YouTube. It means that you are in active user who must have faced at least some issues related to plagiarism and copyright violations. In most cases, you are accused of cheating not by a human, but a bot online. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other social networking sites have automated monitoring bot systems which handle both copyright and artificial intelligence intellectual property cases. Is it a peculiar feature of progress in the process of fighting plagiarism? The answer to this question requires thorough research and understanding of all subtle nuances of using bots for protecting intellectual property. As bots have definitely interfered with your online activity even if you have not realized that, it is high time we started a discussion now.
Looking through beautiful photographs on the websites, you do not have any idea that special bots are used by photographers to send you an invoice if you have accidentally or on purpose used the images without any permission of their owner. You will also be spotted by a bot if you have posted or downloaded pirated video or songs. There is a close connection between intellectual property and AI and unlicensed music, video, or text can be caught even decades after the act of stealing. Currently, while educators and students use PlagiarismSearch.com and similar services to detect plagiarism in texts, copyright infringement can be traced with the help of bots, the impact of which is growing daily. They used to detect cases of cheating, but now their scope covers sending out special notes, handling the appeals, and taking enforcement action.
It has always been known that human content is handled by humans who settle all infringement cases and analyze every problem separately. Still, under the present-day conditions of intense technological development, it would be rather challenging to rely on humans only. This is when bots get on stage and turn the human system of intellectual property upside down.
Bots and Artificial Intelligence Intellectual Property Issues: Questions to Discuss
- Why are bots needed online?
Just fancy that only humans check on the originality of content on Facebook and YouTube! Let us take only these two services as a bright example. With approximately 2.4 million posts per second on Facebook and 500 hours of video/minute uploaded, how many humans would be needed to check on all this content? It is complicated to count and absolutely impossible to put into practice without the new bot platforms.
- Are bots for copyright issues only?
Not really. Bots successfully handle the issues related to
- offence,
- pornographic images,
- hate speech,
- disinformation,
- other problems, including copyright, meant for protecting the rights of the owner and creator.
Bot as a Big Brother: Fair or Unreliable?
According to Forbes, bots are actually taking over the Internet with about 50% of all online traffic at the global level! Every brand nowadays is supposed to take active measures to keep their reputation and protect their intellectual property. Leveraging AI tools, companies make use of the latest solutions to stay competitive, but they face certain problems on the way to success.
- Unreliability and unfair use
Bots cannot understand any hints or context which can be of great importance in particular cases. The texts which plagiarize those of other authors may be confused with the texts which analyze and comment on the ideas of others. Being monitored by bots, websites may lose some of the valuable content for no valid reason.
- Inability to make judgments
Learning on the basis of the texts and adapting the available content, bots at the same time are supposed to protect copyright. It is a paradox which does not let AI play an actually fair game.
- Focus on bot detection
This problem resembles that with learning to take a test successfully when the ultimate goal is not obtaining knowledge but passing the test. People get encouraged to take measures not to be detected by bots, not to place only authentic content online and be law-abiding.
- Lack of intuition
Without human understanding of subtle nuances, even the smartest bots lose points when it goes about profound analysis of content or correct interpretation of the copyright law.
Aiding vs. Replacing
The main thing in the issues related to AI and intellectual property is that originally the main purpose of a bot was to give assistance to a human. Still, the latter decided to rely on AI tools entirely without close monitoring and fixing the detected issues. It is expensive to use human resources; thus, employers get as many processed as possible automated. That is when a bot enjoys its power! Owing to automated algorithms, bots use their functionality to make their own decisions on infringing and authenticity. Does the copyright law benefit from that? It is rather doubtful.
Content creation, graphic design, photography, and other creative fields do suffer from the progress in generative AI developments; still this progress also lets the creators benefit from the use of automated systems which check content for plagiarism. Can anything be done to stop this, returning to the previous state of technologies to destroy the new AI reality? Unfortunately, nothing can be actually done.
Bots have started their games in the field of copyright enforcement and they are the main players now on the vast web space. Have you heard this? Bots have gained the status of main players and humans are gradually losing even those rights they managed to keep. For sure, without unauthorized use of third party content and violation of citations and referencing, it is possible to avoid accusations in plagiarism, still bots without humans can make rather unexpected decisions and that is the process which requires close attention from the humans involved.
Being informed has always been a trump card, but now it has obtained unmatched importance. It will not be simple to navigate in this sphere; still, overcoming the challenges related to intellectual property is a must. There should be a compromise which will let everybody sigh with relief and tame the bots which can be of tremendous help in any work. The future is already here!
