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Originality, Creativity and Copyright in the Age of AI: A Film Archive View

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Venue: TBC

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Speaker: Annie Shaw (British Film Institute), Chair/organiser: Dr. Eleni Liarou (CCC, Birkbeck)

AI raises fundamental questions for film archives around copyright, originality, and creativity, intensified by the speed at which AI is developing and can generate audiovisual works. While this acceleration challenges legal frameworks grounded in human authorship and creative processes, creating uncertainty over whether such works attract copyright protection at all, who, if anyone, owns them, and how they may be licensed or preserved, the same speed may benefit archival practice by supporting faster description, research, and even decision-making. There are many other considerations, including transparency about how works were created, the provenance of training data, and the risk that AI outputs reproduce or appropriate existing copyrighted material. Archives need to balance openness to new forms of moving-image practice with the need to uphold principles of originality, attribution, and public trust in the cultural record. The workshop will open up shared questions around creative labour, rights, ethics, and the role of cultural institutions in shaping responsible approaches to AI.


Annie Shaw is Public Access Researcher at the BFI where she is currently working on audience engagement research for the BFI's archive collections. She leads copyright research, licensing and risk frameworks for the BFI’s mass digitisation archive projects and currently leads the copyright strand for Our Screen Heritage. She is also manager for the BFI contracts and royalites system. She holds a BA and MA in Art History & Theory from the University of Essex and a PG Diploma in UK, EU and US Copyright Law from Kings College, London. She is a member of the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (LACA) and the Europeana Copyright Community Steering Group and works with Film Archives UK. She has spoken on various copyright topics at the UK and EU Intellectual Property Offices as well as at CREATe, CIPPM , FIAF and FIAT/IFTA events.

Presented by Birkbeck's Creative Practice Lab, this workshop is part of Creativity at the Speed of AI, a series of workshops that explores how AI impacts the speed of creative practice, research and production in universities and the creative industries. 
 

Contact name: Eleni Liarou

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