AI Music, Fan Works & Copyright
Michael Lin — President of the International IP Commercialization Council (IIPCC), and an expert at the Patent Mediation and Arbitration Centre of the Unified Patent Court. He has worked on IP and business in Asia since 1997, and he holds a JD from Boston University School of Law. He was our guest on EP03. Billy Poon — Council member of the Hong Kong Institute of Patent Attorneys. As a patent scientist at GRST he was an inventor on a water-based lithium-ion battery recycling patent, and he handled office actions from Chinese, European, Japanese, Korean and US patent examiners. He has a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Hong Kong.
Chapters
- 0:00Could AI squat on every song?
- 1:06Intro
- 1:20Welcome, and why we keep talking about IP
- 2:46Billy Poon, patent scientist and inventor
- 4:30Where patent teams sit: Procter & Gamble
- 5:30The Chinese patent attorney exam, and Billy's invention
- 8:02AI music and copyright
- 10:29YouTube Content ID and AI-generated songs
- 12:42Copyright strikes when your channel is small
- 14:11Squatting, and independent creation as a defence
- 16:30Marvin Gaye and unconscious copying
- 16:55Copyleft
- 17:31Reverse-engineering PlayStation games with AI
- 18:54Fan works: sue them or work with them?
- 19:50Louis Vuitton, Luigi and the Lego film
- 21:54Angry Birds: turning infringers into licensees
- 25:20Paper Gucci bags for the ancestors
- 28:28When the enforcers' incentives differ from the brand's
- 29:15Chinese law, Hong Kong law: is there a model?
- 30:58How China built its patent law
- 31:53IIPCC and advising governments
- 32:56What's new in AI: cloud agents and Opus 5.5
- 34:12Claude vs OpenAI: style vs code review
- 34:51Is OpenAI Microsoft and Claude Apple?
- 35:27The limit is now your imagination
- 36:53What the labs see in their internal models
- 38:08Billionaire bunkers in New Zealand
- 40:03Goodbyes, and the tattoo exhibition
About This Episode
Michael Lin has worked on IP in Asia since 1997. Billy Poon is a patent scientist and an inventor, and he is studying for China's patent attorney exam, which fewer than 10% of candidates pass. Over a meal after the Hong Kong China International Tattoo Exhibition, Tanya and Augustin ask them what AI changes about intellectual property. Could someone generate thousands of songs with AI, register them with YouTube's Content ID and take down everyone else's videos? Michael says theory and practice are very different. AI-generated work may not be copyrightable, and in copyright, independent creation is a defence. They also talk about what brands should do when fans use their IP (Lego, Angry Birds, and the paper Gucci bags that Hong Kong burns for its ancestors), how China built its patent law, and what is new in AI: cloud agents, Claude versus OpenAI, and the bunkers in New Zealand.