Webinar: User Rights in the Age of Generative AI
Date: February 25, 2026
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm ET
Since the Supreme Court of Canada’s 2004 decision in CCH Canada Ltd v Law Society of Upper Canada, the global copyright landscape has changed considerably. While a number of jurisdictions have transplanted, or considered the transplantation of, a fair use or user right regime from abroad, other jurisdictions have actively introduced express copyright exceptions to support text and data mining and the creation of parodies, satires, caricatures, and pastiche works.
In the past few years, the arrival of ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, Copilot, and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools has also raised new questions among policymakers and commentators concerning the future development of copyright law. In the AI area, three sets of issues have dominated the policy and academic debates: (1) the eligibility of AI-generated creations for copyright protection; (2) the unauthorized use of copyright works to train AI models; and (3) the use of AI to support the protection, enforcement, or licensing of rights under copyright law.
This presentation examines the protection of user rights in the age of generative AI. It further explores the challenges and uncertainties surrounding such protection. The presentation concludes by interrogating whether the arrival of generative AI has raised new questions about the protection of user rights—and if so, what policy responses should be introduced to address these questions.
Speaker: Professor Peter K. Yu
“Peter K. Yu (余家明) is University Distinguished Professor, Regents Professor of Law and Communication and Director of the Center for Law and Intellectual Property at Texas A&M University. He held the Kern Family Chair in Intellectual Property Law at Drake University and was Wenlan Scholar Chair Professor at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan, China. He served as a visiting professor of law at Bocconi University, Hanken School of Economics, Hokkaido University, Tel Aviv University, the University of Haifa, the University of Helsinki, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Strasbourg and Washington and Lee University. He also founded the nationally renowned Intellectual Property & Communications Law Program at Michigan State University, at which he held faculty appointments in law, communication arts and sciences, and Asian studies.” View his full biography.