Times have changed so that nature and humans have had to adapt. In each of these changes, humankind also makes reflections, thinking whether the change will bring something positive or even harmful. These reflections lead to the words disruption. Then the questions that then arise are, What is disruption? To what extent must the legal field adapt?
At the national seminar held by the Faculty of Law, Airlangga University entitled The 1st National Seminar on Digitalization in Law and Society in Indonesia “Understanding Changes in Indonesian Law and Society towards Digital Disruption” last Monday (3/4/2023), the origins of the words of disruption by Prof. H. Syafrinaldi, S.H., M.C.L. The disruption here was born from the impact of technological developments. Utilization carried out by various sectors creates positive and negative effects, and both mean the same thing, namely, to cause change. This change drives massive innovation, so big that inevitably, consciously or unconsciously, it will cause a significant overhaul of the new system. And that is what is called disruption.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
In the field of law itself, digital disruption is rife in the area of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). “It should be noted that IPR consists of copyrights and industrial property rights,” said the Chancellor of the Islamic University of Riau, Prof. Syafrinaldi in the first plenary session at the national seminar. For example, Indonesians love to buy imitation products. Indonesians often purchase brands are Supreme, Ray Ban, and Vans. This violates the IPR of the company that owns it and reduces the country’s foreign exchange.
Then why did technological disruption then become so influential on IPR? This is due to the ease of access to technology as a tool to quickly revive certain parties’ economies. Not infrequently, this tool can commit plagiarism, take illegal input data, or even produce something that can violate other people’s intellectual property rights. This can trigger purchases of imitation brands, as in the example above, or other things with more pervasive consequences.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Through the second plenary session, Prof. Stefan Koos, a professor from Universität der Bundeswehr München, also said that AI (artificial intelligence) is a catalyst or “tool” prone to being used as a medium for plagiarism. This is because AI can enter input data from open sources. Even though AI makers say that AI can only take input from sources that can be accessed directly on the internet, it does not rule out that the input data has a license.
As we know, there are AIs like “Dall-E” and “ChatGPT” whose description matches Prof. Stefan Koos’s. According to the OpenAI website, Dall-E is a 12 billion parameter version of GPT-3 that is trained to generate images from text descriptions using a data set of text and image pairs. This allows Dall-E to pinch pictures matching the keywords its users provided to create a new image. The same thing happens with ChatGPT, but what is generated is not an image, but text. Things like this cause the need for the development of regulations and laws in their arrangements.
Prof. Stefan Koos said, “Two years ago, we didn’t see AI as something that could be turned into a legal subject. But by now, we’ve realized that AI is sometimes their own ruler and not a tool. Some of their work sometimes needs to be held accountable.” Then, related to this sentence, he also asked us to be more critical in addressing this matter. Who knows, in the next 5 or 10 years, we will have to reconstruct our understanding of “tools” as well as their misconception as a separate legal subject. But related to this, in the current era, Prof. Stefan Koos is more comfortable calling AI an entity that is nothing more than a for-use concept and sui generis copyright in terms of its use.
The Role of Law Enforcement
Then, the role of law is also needed in digital disruption. Prof. Syafrenaldi said that at least we can enforce the law. He said “America advanced because of the patent law, and Japan also advanced because of the law in terms of research.” He also reminded the audience about Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that “everyone has the right to participate freely in the cultural life of society, to share scientific progress and its benefits, and to receive appreciation for their work”.
This indicates that laws and regulations can be legal instruments to address digital disruption. It cannot be denied that change must bring a lot of entropy, namely disorder, randomness, and uncertainty, so there must be a standard in the midst of that entropy. The standard is the law because upholding it will provide a straighter path to its development and disruption.
