This summer, I had the exciting opportunity to intern at Fasken, an experience that has been both immensely educational and thought-provoking. Fasken is an international business law firm that provides a comprehensive range of legal services across various practices and industries globally. As a cognitive science student interested in legal interdisciplinarity, I was particularly keen to work in their Ottawa office, which houses the Technology, Media and Telecommunications group. Their practice includes communication and public law with a focus on intellectual property, including copyright and trademark.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of the mind and intelligence in both humans and machines鈥攄rawing on the fields of neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science. This conceptual background closely aligns with artificial intelligence, which focuses on building systems that replicate the human mind and its components, like memory, language, and decision-making. Within the current artificial intelligence zeitgeist, I find intellectual property law to be an opportunistic and uniquely positioned discipline that can serve as a modality to address the novel challenges AI presents to our society.
Amy Qi outside of the Fasken office in Ottawa.
During my time at Fasken, I have worked on a series of three projects at the intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright law. The first centers on the copyright infringement of training data for Large Language Models. By evaluating landmark cases on the topic and completing legal research, I summarized the courts鈥� analysis of the four factors of American Copyright Law that are used to assess fair use and compared the differing decisions and their impacts. The second focuses on legislation surrounding deepfakes and their presence in the entertainment industry. As the harms of deepfake content continue to materialize, several governments have attempted to regulate it. My work focused on synthesizing these attempts and discussing their merits and potential setbacks. The third pertains to the ownership of copyright for AI-generated works. Given that various LLMs have the ability to create entire books, videos, and articles, the question of ownership of these works is a novel issue in the intellectual property landscape. Similar to the first project, I conducted legal research using case law to discuss the status quo and future of AI-generated content. For all three, I distilled my research into podcast scripts, which were then recorded to be broadcast through Fasken鈥檚 social media channels.
Work laptop with research of the Anthropic copyright case.
Reflecting on my experience, working at Fasken has been an incredible learning opportunity that has expanded my perspective on the scope of law and developed my awareness of the numerous challenges that AI presents. Nevertheless, the most defining and rewarding part of this internship was the opportunity to work under my supervisor, Jay Kerr-Wilson, who graciously fostered an environment that prioritized my interests and learning, while providing feedback and supporting my project. Although I initially experienced challenges navigating and understanding case law and the legal standards being applied, Jay was always happy to answer my questions and help clarify legal analysis.
Overall, my time at Fasken has been invaluable in shaping my future pursuits (hopefully) in law and would not be possible without the gracious support of the Faculty of Arts Internship Awards. I am deeply grateful for this opportunity and would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to the 91丝瓜视频 Faculty of Arts for their generosity. I leave this internship with a renewed excitement about cognitive science and the future of interdisciplinarity within the legal field.
