Navigating Copyright Challenges in the Age of AI-Generated Content: An Uncharted Legal Landscape Law & Beyond

He listed the Creativity Machine, an AI system, as the exclusive creator of an artwork titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise”. Having said all of that, I could imagine that advertising could really benefit from it as long as all of the permissions were in order. Mimicry has always been a cornerstone of the advertising world, and it’s often at its best when it recreates famous film scenes or re-records well known classics. You can have that one for free, but generally, imitation or impersonation is nowhere near as popular as it was when I was growing up. As long as the organic and human element of music remains, we can easily imagine a world in which human and AI-created music cohabit peacefully. The evolving landscape of music and technology necessitates a balanced perspective that welcomes AI integration while preserving the distinctive value of human-crafted music.

The US Copyright Office states, though, that “copyright will only protect the human-authored aspects of the work”. “Sometimes, I set a system free to imagine new intellectual property,” Thaler said in a YouTuber interview with MediaNama. As AI legislation and regulations develop, there is potential for international discrepancies to cause serious legal complications. Ryan Abbott, Thaler’s attorney, has already signalled intentions to appeal the judgment. And as AI continues to evolve and intertwine itself more deeply within the creative sectors, it’s inevitable that this conversation will resurface. While this particular case may appear clear-cut – Thaler admitted to having no role in the creation of the artwork – the broader debate is far from settled.

Artists, AI and copyright

The government also indicated that the law relating to computer generated works would not change in the immediate future, meaning that the existing position concerning copyright protection will be retained. It is likely therefore that the UK will not make major changes to legislation governing AI and copyright until it is forced to do so, perhaps as a result of case law such as the Getty Images case. With AI capabilities accelerating, it may be that 2023 is the year that such regulatory change will in fact be triggered. In the UK, stock image company Getty Images announced that it is bringing an action against the practices used in training Stability AI. In this instance, Getty Images argues that the AI unlawfully copied and processed millions of copyright protected images without a licence in order to improve its outputs. The outcome of these cases could be pivotal to the use and implementation of AI, which may shape how copyright is licenced in the future.

This could lead to forum shopping where prospective copyright owners deliberately choose to take out proceedings in jurisdictions that recognize copyright in computer-generated work. As the question of human intervention is not a black-and-white matter but lies on a spectrum, advancements in AI technology are increasingly pushing the definition towards the “computer-generated” end of the spectrum as the amount of human intervention decreases. The latter is where work is generated with little or no little human input leaving copyright subsistence in question. A related problem with the Arrangement Model is it may attribute authorship to people who have no creative input or even creative intent at all. Notably, the provision of “mak(ing) the necessary arrangements for the creation” does not specify that the arrangements must be creative.

The Legal Implications of AI-Generated Content in Copyright Law

The UK is aiming to become the ‘home of AI development’ and so other countries may relax their laws similarly to also take advantage of this emerging area. If other countries follow suit, the issue of AI-generated copyright genrative ai infringement could become a global concern. Therefore, it is essential that robust, comprehensive and internationally harmonised regulations are implemented to navigate this complex and evolving landscape.

A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

Last month,
Buzz feed announced it was planning to harness artificial
intelligence as part of its core business to personalize and
enhance its online quizzes and content (and that it would also be
cutting about 12% of its workforce to rein in costs). In the filing, Thaler referred to his DABUS AI as a “creativity machine,” citing an image generated by the tool, albeit one rather basic by the standards of the latest AI image-generation software. The end result of the above is that a large number of commercial entities operating both in the US and Europe are able to scrape images from the Internet for the purpose of data mining, and they can make reproduction and extraction of such materials.

But the company says it’s up to users to ensure the way they use that content does not violate any laws. The terms and conditions are also subject to change, so do not carry the stability and force of a legal right such as copyright. The first question is whether ChatGPT should be allowed to use original content generated by third parties to generate its responses.

However, with investment now flooding into the company a monetisation strategy is clearly not far behind. In the meantime, whilst OpenAI continues to provide ChatGPT for free, there are already lots of people monetising it for themselves. The US Copyright Office has also denied a copyright genrative ai to an artist who used the generative AI Midjourney to create a work, saying the system was part of their creative process. For instance, an applicant who integrates AI-generated text into a larger textual work must claim authorship of the human-authored sections of the text.

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Unlike most other countries, UK legislation can provide
copyright protection to a work generated by a computer in
circumstances where there is no human author. The law provides that
such works will be owned by a human or corporate person, but the
computer program or AI itself can never be the author or owner of
the IP. Wholly AI-generated artwork the law would most
likely designate the platform creators (i.e. those who designed the
AI technology)as the authors, rather than the AI itself. In addition, businesses that create AI models need to make sure that they legally own or have permission to use the data that they use to train their models. They might, for example, need to obtain intellectual property licences either just to cover the use of data for training or additionally the use of the data in the creation of new material (ie in the AI’s output). This could protect the business if the AI creates content that would otherwise infringe copyrights existing in the data used to train it.