Ryan Abbott, University of Surrey School of Law; University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, and Elizabeth Shubov, The Cantellus Group, have published The Revolution Has Arrived: AI Authorship and Copyright Law. Here is the abstract.
Very recently, due largely to breakthroughs in deep learning technologies, AI has begun stepping into the shoes of human content generators and making valuable creative works at scale. Before the end of the decade, a significant amount of art, literature, music, software, and web content will likely be created by AI rather than traditional human authors. Yet the law, as it has so often historically, lags this technological evolution by prohibiting copyright protection for AI-generated works. The predominant narrative holds that even if AI can automate creativity, that this activity is not the right sort of thing to protect, and that protection could even harm human artists. AI-generated works challenge beliefs about human exceptionalism and the normative foundations of copyright law, which until now have offered something for everyone. Copyright can be about ethics and authors and protecting the sweat of a brow and personality rights. Copyright can also be about money and the public interest and offering incentives to create and disseminate content. But copyright cannot have it all with AI authors—there is valuable output being generated, but by authors with no interests to protect. This forces a reevaluation of copyright law’s history and purpose. This article argues that American copyright law is, and has been traditionally, primarily about benefiting the public interest rather than benefiting authors directly. As a result, AI-generated works are precisely the sort of thing the system was designed to protect. Protection will encourage people to develop and use creative AI and to produce and disseminate new works. Taken further, attributing authorship to AI when an AI has functionally done the work of a traditional author will promote transparency, efficient allocations of rights, and even counterintuitively protect human authors. Exploring the challenges associated with AI-generated works is an opportunity to rethink basic tenets of copyright law like originality, how the law should accommodate advances in technology, and even how to think more broadly about the rules that apply to people, machines, and other sorts of artificial authors.
Download the article from SSRN at the link.
