Korea copyright conference to focus on AI transparency and fair training data

South Korea's culture ministry said Wednesday it will hold an international conference on copyright technology in Seoul, bringing together academics and industry researchers to discuss how to make artificial intelligence outputs more transparent and how to protect creators' works from unauthorized training.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism is organizing the 16th International Copyright Technology Conference with the Korea Copyright Commission and the Korea Copyright Protection Agency at the JW Marriott Dongdaemun Square Seoul Grand Ballroom. The event will also be streamed live on YouTube, the ministry said.

The one-day program is built around two themes: transparency in generative AI and the protection of rights over training data.

In the opening keynote, Lee Sang-wook, a professor at Hanyang University, will revisit creation and copyright in the age of generative AI. Garrett Levin, a senior intellectual property law and policy officer at the World Intellectual Property Organization, will follow with a recorded address on copyright infrastructure for the AI era and the direction of global technical cooperation.

The first session will examine technical standards meant to raise confidence in AI-generated material. Speakers include Kim Sung-woong of Korea University on watermarking for transparency, Kim Young-min of the Korea Electronics Technology Institute on dataset copyright technology in multimodal models, and Andy Parsons, a senior director at Adobe, on industry adoption of C2PA and Content Credentials. Jang Hak-sung of SK Telecom will present an AI bill of materials, a record of the data, models and software used in developing an AI system.

The second session turns to the rights of creators whose works are used to train AI models. Lee Jong-pil, chief executive of Newtoon, will propose attribution and licensing systems for datasets, while Han Chang-heon of Chalmers University of Technology will discuss attribution of training data for AI music generation. Kang Sang-wook of Sangmyung University will present machine unlearning and knowledge distillation as ways to resolve copyright disputes, and Kim Young-sik of DGIST will discuss blocking unauthorized training through adversarial noise and adaptive watermarking. Kim So-im of LG Electronics will present the company's open-source data project.

Awards will also be presented to people and organizations credited with advancing copyright protection and related technology, including a ministerial award to Chung Hae-joon of Hanyang University and a WIPO award to Kim Sang-pil of Korea University.

"In an era of rapid digital innovation, the importance of copyright technology is growing beyond simple protection, as it helps establish a new order in the AI creation ecosystem by creating an environment for the fair use of training data," said Choi Young-jin, the ministry's copyright policy director. He added that the ministry will gather views on the latest trends and issues discussed at the conference and reflect them in its copyright technology policy.