We are delighted to host Monica Westin for the Inaugural Lecture of our new LLM in Technology Law and Regulation. The lecture is taking place on 28th October at 5:30pm in the Advanced Research Centre (room 237ABC) and is part of the University of Glasgow Data Science and AI Festival (27-29 October).

Monica Westin - Copyright as Infrastructure in the Age of AI: Coordination failures, maintenance debt, and practical remedies

This talk explores copyright as infrastructure in the age of AI: the shared, networked, and interoperable systems that lower transaction costs, enable scale, shape participation, and, following Chachra, embody “material expressions of shared commitments.” This perspective illuminates two copyright infrastructure failure modes central to the scholarly knowledge economy. First, coordination failures: cross-border operation without global standards generates friction, exclusion, and unreliable signals. Second, maintenance debt exposed by LLMs and generative AI: brittle rights metadata, unclear licensing for machine uses, patchy exceptions, and weak integrity/usage indicators. The paper advances practical remedies grounded in the principles of infrastructural maintenance: modern, interoperable rights registries and identifiers; programmatic and collective licensing models for computational use; transparent, routinely updated exceptions and policies; and fit-for-purpose metrics that recognise quality and stewardship over volume. Treating copyright as infrastructure foregrounds coordination and maintenance as prerequisites for an equitable, scalable, and trustworthy research ecosystem.

 Monica is Director of Open Policy Development at Cambridge University Press and Assessment. Her previous roles involved work at the California Digital Library, Google, the Internet Archive and Manchester Metropolitan University.