ARL Public Policy Briefing
December 2024
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Katherine Klosek, Director, Information Policy and Federal Relations
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The monthly Public Policy Briefing highlights developments in ARL’s public policy priorities, issues that are relevant to the research library community in the United States and Canada, and details on advocacy conducted by ARL and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). Please encourage your colleagues to sign up for the Public Policy Briefing.
If you have questions or suggestions, please email me at kklosek@arl.org.
It was great to see many of you at the recent Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) Membership Meeting! I hope you have a restful break this holiday season.
This month, the Canadian government launched an initiative to strengthen Canada’s position as a global leader in AI. The Canadian government announced that on December 16, the eve of the federal government rising for the holiday break, it will be releasing the Fall Economic Statement.
The US Copyright Office will issue its much-awaited reports on legal issues related to the ingestion of copyrighted works to train AI models, and the copyrightability of generative AI outputs, in 2025. ARL continues to track AI bills in the waning days of the 118th Congress. ARL and coalition partners continue to successfully push back on the Pro Codes Act, which would extend copyright protection to elements of the law. This month’s Public Policy Briefing includes an update on how libraries can participate in the End of Term Web Archive initiative.
Read on for more details!
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy
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Copyright and Fair Use/Fair Dealing
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Preserving Federal Information
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) Policy
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ARL continues to track legislative proposals to regulate AI. This week, the bipartisan US House of Representatives AI task force—chaired by Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Ted Lieu (D-CA)—issued its final report. The report did not endorse any particular legislation, but it offers a roadmap for priorities in the Republican-led Congress next year. In the intellectual property section of the report, the task force finds that it is “unclear whether legislative action is necessary in some cases, and a number of IP issues are currently in the courts,” suggesting that Congress may leave fair use determinations up to the courts. The findings also point to the potential harms of AI-generated deepfakes; this is an issue that Congress attempted to legislate this year.
ARL has advocated for Congress to regulate specific harmful uses of AI, rather than creating broad restrictions that would implicate otherwise lawful and socially beneficial uses. Meanwhile, the NO FAKES Act—which takes a broad approach to governing AI-generated deepfakes, with implications for speech and scholarly applications—will not pass this Congress.
The Transparency and Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence Networks (TRAIN) Act (S. 5379) will also not pass this year, but bills like this are a signal that Congress needs more education on how their regulatory attempts might chill research that relies on AI. Under the TRAIN Act, a copyright holder can ask a US district court to issue a subpoena to an AI model developer based on a “subjective good faith belief” that their copyrighted works were used to train the model; the subpoena would require the model developer to disclose “copies of, or records sufficient to identify with certainty, the copyrighted works.”
ARL will monitor attempts to legislate AI in the 119th Congress.
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Canada Launches Investment in AI Compute
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On December 5, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada officially launched the Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, an investment of up to $2 billion to advance AI in Canada by investing up to $700 million to support private sector investment; $1 billion to build public supercomputing infrastructure that will include expanding existing public AI compute capacity managed by the AI Institutes, National Research Council, and the Digital Research Alliance of Canada; and, increasing access for Canadian innovators by providing up to $300 million to help small and medium-sized enterprises in key sectors access affordable compute power.
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Copyright and Fair Use/Fair Dealing
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ARL, Coalition Partners Push Back on Pro Codes Act in Year-End Legislation
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This month ARL sent a sign-on letter asking Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to vote against the Pro Codes Act, particularly if it is attached to another bill that Congress must pass before the end of the year. If passed, Pro Codes would extend copyright protection to elements of the law. Pro Codes was not attached to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and it is unlikely to be attached to a continuing resolution to fund the federal government.
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US Copyright Office to Issue AI Report in 2025
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In a letter to leaders of the Intellectual Subcommittee of the House and Senate Judiciary Committee, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter confirmed that the US Copyright Office will issue the remaining sections of its much-awaited report on copyright and AI in 2025, rather than by the end of 2024. Part two of the report is on the copyrightability of generative AI outputs, and part three will analyze legal issues related to the ingestion of copyrighted works to train AI models, including licensing considerations and the allocation of potential liability.
The Copyright Office issued the first part of its report this summer, calling for federal legislation to address the potential harms of AI-generated deepfakes (you can read our coverage in the July/August 2024 Public Policy Briefing). Watch this space for an analysis of the subsequent sections of the report’s implications for research libraries.
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Preserving Federal Information
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Libraries Can Contribute to End of Term Web Archive
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End of Term Web Archive is a collaborative initiative to prevent the loss of federal government information by preserving US government websites at the end of presidential administrations, and making them available to the public. University of North Texas (UNT) and Internet Archive (IA) perform crawling for the project, and make the web content available for future use through IA’s Wayback Machine and the UNT End of Term Publications collection.
Because some federal websites are difficult to find, preserve, and collect, the project relies on volunteer subject matter experts to identify such sites. If you come across a federal government database or website that you want to be preserved, you can nominate the URL. Each nominated URL will be documented, even if it cannot be collected. For more on the End of Term Archive and how to contribute see the Government Information Watch website.
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