The Conflict Analytics Lab of Queen’s Faculty of Law has partnered with France-based LegalEDHEC research centre of the EDHEC Business School to incorporate artificial intelligence in the field of intellectual property law.
The Conflict Analytics Lab of Queen’s Faculty of Law has partnered with France-based LegalEDHEC research centre of the EDHEC Business School to incorporate artificial intelligence in the field of intellectual property law.
The Trademark Similarity Assessment project seeks to develop a system based on deep learning — or analysis of text and images — in order to make it easier to detect the risk of confusion in brand counterfeiting cases, the organizations said in a statement.
In addition to their researchers, Queen’s Law and EDHEC will involve their students in executing the project, through analysis of jurisprudence and the determination of the criteria used by judges to assess the risk of confusion associated with legal action concerning brand counterfeiting.
The tool has three objectives: use machine learning to identify the visual and textual characteristics specific to each brand, assess the risk of similarity between brands and enable lawyers and judges to uniformly assess the risk of confusion between brands.
“This transatlantic project offers an incredible opportunity to improve comparison tools in the trademark law field,” said Samuel Dahan, professor at Queen’s Law and director of the Conflict Analytics Lab. “The major progress made with image processing, particularly thanks to Facebook’s Detectron technology, allows thousands of brands to be compared in just a few seconds.”
“The project is fully consistent with the development of our ‘Advanced Law, Lawyers and Lawyering’ strategic research work within LegalEDHEC,” said Christophe Roquilly, professor at EDHEC and director of the LegalEDHEC research centre. “It focuses on two major objectives: determine how digital technology and AI are now transforming law, legal practice and the competencies expected of in-house legal counsels and analyze how law needs to respond to the risks and opportunities inherent to the ongoing transformation of the economy by digital and AI.
“This tool could have a sizeable impact on judicial decision-making and especially improve the significant problems of coherency that currently exist between the systems in Europe, the USA and Canada,” Roquilly added.
