Artificial Intelligence to create challenges for policy makers in future: WIPO DG

Growing use of Artifical Intelligence will create challenges for the policy makers dealing with intellectual property rights in the times to come, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry said Tuesday.

The DG of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) suggested that the problem of piracy in the media industry can be taken care of by business model based on reasonable subscription rates.

The future deliberations among policy makers globally would have to focus on whether actions need to be taken at the regulatory end or at the business level with regard to Intellectual Property laws as artificial intelligence is expected to play a disruptive role on the production side.

"It will not be long before Artificial Intelligence generated music is a regular feature. So you will see great disruption not only in distribution which you are seeing now, and consumption the way we consume music and audio visual, we will see that in case of production as well. So there are many many questions out there," Gurry said.

He is here in connection with the two-day 'Global Digital Content Market' conference being organised by WIPO in collaboration with the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP). The conference will bring together CEOs, artists from around the world to discuss on opportunities and challenges of intellectual property rights in the digital age.

Referring to the issue of piracy, especially in the music and film industry, Gurry said the problem to a great extent can be sorted out by making accessible content digitally.

"Music industry was resistant to digital world initially and then over time ... in the last 2/3 years we saw expansion of music industry because of subscription... It is streaming based subscription, a new business model which makes available content on accessible terms. I think there is a lesson in that -- making available content reasonably.

"We have to be intelligent in the way we address piracy and recognise that business and business models have a lot to play by making available content on accessible terms. It helps compliance," he added.

Talking about India's IPR regime, Gurry said that India has made extraordinary efforts in recent years in strengthening its IPR regime.

"There is an extra ordinary reduction in processing time (of IPR applications). There is an improvement in the infrastructure of IP offices," he said.

Gurry said with time the distribution of content has gone from physical to digital and also from local to global.

"Some of the matters that need to be addressed from Intellectual Property point of view is how do we ensure that creators and artists continue to be protected. So that they are better protected and better remunerated in the digital platform...," he added.