Pamela Samuelson (born August 4, 1948) is an American legal scholar, activist, and philanthropist. She is the Richard M. Sherman '74 Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1996. She holds a joint appointment at the UC Berkeley School of Information. She is a co-founder and chair of Authors Alliance and a co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy.
Professional history A 1971 graduate of the University of Hawaiʻi and a 1976 graduate of Yale Law School, Samuelson practiced law as a litigation associate with Willkie Farr & Gallagher before becoming an academic. From 1981 through 1996 she was a member of the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools. Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1996, she has held visiting professorships at Harvard Law School, NYU School of Law, Toronto Law School, Fordham University School of Law. Since 2002, she has held an honorary professorship at the University of Amsterdam. Samuelson is a past Fellow of the John D and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005, she was awarded the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award for Social Impact, and in 2010 received the IP3 award from Public Knowledge.
Scholarship Samuelson has published over 300 articles for law, technical, and general audiences, focused mainly on copyright law and preserving balance in copyright law amidst innovation and technological change. Although her work is typically directed at U.S. law, it also includes comparative study of U.S. and European approaches to intellectual property.
AI and copyright Samuelson has written about two distinct problems that generative AI poses for copyright law. First: when a computer program generates a work, who owns the copyright to that work? In 1985, Samuelson argued that copyright for works created by computer programs should be allocated to the user of the program, rather than to the computer, the programmer, or some combination of those parties. She also forecast that "[a]s 'artificial intelligence' (AI) programs become increasingly sophisticated in their role as the 'assistants' of humans in the [creation] of a wide range of products... the question of who will own what rights in the 'output' of such programs may well become a hotly contested issue." More recently, the advent of large language models such as ChatGPT has sparked lawsuits by copyright holders over the use of their works as "training" material for the programs. Samuelson has argued that such training may well constitute fair use, and warned that allowing copyright holders to restrict use of their works as training materials would "affect everyone who deploys generative AI, integrates it into their products, and uses it for scientific research."
Mapping and defending fair use Fair use permits the unlicensed use of original expression from copyright-protected works in certain circumstances. However, the flexibility of the doctrine led Judge Pierre Leval to describe it as "mysterious" and lament the perception that it is a "disorderly basket of exceptions". Courts formally assess four factors in determining whether a given use is fair. in 2009, Samuelson augmented that analysis by canvassing the fair use case law and grouping opinions into what she termed "policy-relevant clusters" according to which of the goals of fair use the decision implicates: 1) freedom of speech and of expression; 2) the ongoing progress of authorship 3) learning; 4) access to information; 5) truth telling or truth seeking; 6) competition; 7) technological innovation; and 8) privacy and autonomy interests. Samuelson's framework has been described as making a "convincing case that fair use may not be as doctrinally incoherent as many have suggested".
Google Books settlement In 2004, Google initiated the Print Library Project, in which the company partnered with university libraries to scan their entire book collections. Books digitized in the project were searchable in the Google Books engine, where users could view certain information about the books, and "snippets" of text. The Author's Guild and several individual authors filed suit, alleging copyright infringement. In 2008, Google and the Guild announced a settlement agreement, whereby Google could continue to operate Google Book Search, but would have to pay copyright holders for use. Importantly, the settlement would apply to all books. In a letter to the court, Samuelson argued that the settlement was not in the best interests of academic (as opposed to commercial) authors. She observed that "academic authors would be inclined to think that scanning books to index them was fair use, not copyright infringement". They would, moreover, "be likely to want their out-of print books to be available on an open access basis rather than through a profit-maximizing scheme such as the GBS settlement proposed." The court eventually rejected the settlement and Google Books was ruled fair use. The court cited Samuelson's letter in holding that the Author's Guild did not adequately represent the interests of all authors.
Founding of Authors Alliance To enable the promulgation of broader perspectives on copyright policy issues, in 2014, Samuelson co-founded Authors Alliance, a non-profit that "advocates for the interests of authors who want to serve the public good by sharing their creations broadly". Authors Alliance has actively participated in comments to the Copyright Office on its policy initiatives, filed amicus briefs in cases addressing copyright and other information policy issues, and in policy debates at conferences and other events.
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