Can Artificial Intelligence be granted Autorship?
The U.S. Copyright Office has once again denied the registration of an artwork created by artificial intelligence. Artist Jason M. Allen was unsuccessful in his second attempt to register the artwork “Theatre D’opera Spatial” as a copyrighted work because it contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
The decision raises fundamental questions about copyright law, such as the definition of the author and the characteristics of the creative process leading to the creation of a work that enjoys copyright protection. The Office explained that the artwork, created using the Midjourney Image program and regardless of the fact that the applicant’s input amounted to more than 600 commands (known as “prompts”), is not the result of human creativity. However, the Office did not rule out the possibility of recognizing copyright rights to an individual creator of such a result – the applicant would thus have to limit his claim to those elements of the work that reflect the human creative process and not those parts generated and performed by AI.
Clearly, this decision will significantly influence the understanding of the necessary (creative) role of a human in the creation of AI-generated work. These requirements differ across legal systems and are more precisely described in the contribution by Maja Bogataj Jančič in the monograph “Pravo in umetna inteligenca: vprašanje etike, človekovih pravic in družbene škode”, published in 2021 by the Institute for Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana.
Picture Théâtre D’opéra Spatial, generated with Midjourney Image
The District Court of Hamburg ruled in the case of Kneschke v. LAION e.V. that LAION did not infringe the copyright of photographer Kneschke, as the use of his photograph was covered by the exception for text and data mining (TDM) for scientific purposes.
“Can copyright bring artificial intelligence to its knees? Which other circumstances may cause that the “making” of generative AI can dramatically change in the (near) future. This short paper presents potential challenges that copyright poses to the training of the machines on large amount of data. Different jurisdictions address these issues differently. In the USA the legality of these activities is tested in several court cases. Do gentlemen’s agreements and pragmatic symbiosis known from the “search engines business model” provide sufficient basis and/or incentive for the business model of “making” generative AI business model as well?
On Friday, September 27, 2024, the last day of the international conference “Converging Realms: Law, Technology, and Society in the Age of Ethical and Multi-Agent AI” took place. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič took part in the 4th panel entitled Artificial Intelligence+Research.