US Judge Rules AI-Generated Art Not Protected by Copyright Law

Ultimately, its goal is to benefit the public by promoting the “progress of science,” as the U.S. Because of this, we think new technology should typically be judged by what it accomplishes with respect to those goals, and not by the incidental mechanical or technological means that it uses to achieve its ends. Although this has become another widely discussed topic due to ongoing strikes by Hollywood writers and actors, who are fighting, in part, against a desire by studios to use generative AI in place of human writers and performers.

Whether prompted to write a corporate slogan, create music, generate works of art and advertisements, or summarize a book — GAI can do it all. However, its increasing popularity means that users of GAI programs face substantial intellectual property risks — particularly when businesses use GAI for marketing and other public-facing purposes. From the input perspective, the main issue relates to the activities needed to build an AI system. In particular, the training stage of the AI tools requires the scrapping and extraction of relevant information from underlying datasets, which often contain copyright protected works.

Generative AI ERP Systems: 10 Use Cases & Benefits

Cem’s work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE, NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade.

If that is the case, then it is of paramount importance to clarify the meaning and scope of this obligation. Here, the last minute addition of this requirement shows the absence of any impact assessment of its meaning, scope and implications. In the time remaining in the legislative process, the EP  – as well as the Council and Commission during trilogue – should carefully consider what type Yakov Livshits of transparency is required to enable commercial TDM opt-outs, if that is the desired policy goal. Before we proceed, it is important to clarify at what stage we are in the legislative procedure of the EU AI Act. Following the normal co-legislative procedure, the European Parliament (EP) and the Council started to discuss their own versions of the Act, based on the Commission’s proposal.

Related Content

Although AI’s assistance does not prevent an individual from obtaining a limited registration from the USCO, there may be other legal challenges to consider. As one example, several generative AI platforms are at the forefront of pending litigation relating to copyright infringement. If it is ultimately determined that AI companies have infringed on certain creators’ copyrighted work, it could mean a lot more lawsuits in the coming years — and a potentially expensive penalty for the companies at fault.

More specifically, the text, which Ms. Kashtanova authored, and the arrangement of the AI-generated images, which she also performed, could be registered for copyright protection. By drawing distinctions between the text, the images and the arrangement of the images, the USCO drew boundaries illustrating the portions of works that can—and those that cannot—be afforded copyright protection when an author is assisted by generative AI. As a result, the USCO re-registered the comic book, excluding from the registration, the images generated by AI. For a long time, it was considered acceptable to quote up to 400 words without permission, though that “rule” was no more than an urban legend, and never part of copyright law.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
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.

Although the body of case law for music and other art forms is larger, it’s even less clear how these ideas apply. Just as quoting a poem in its entirety is a copyright violation, you can’t reproduce images in their entirety without permission. Counting words isn’t just ill-defined, Yakov Livshits it is useless for works that aren’t made of words. In some cases, these issues can be addressed by information policy doctrines outside of copyright, and in others, they can be best handled by regulations or technical standards addressing development and use of generative AI models.

• While we believe that the human authorship requirement is sound, it would be helpful to have more clarity on the status of works that incorporate generative AI content.
• Given this highly artistic output, it is hard to give authorship solely to the programmer while bypassing the immense input from the real artist Rembrandt.
• However, ongoing policy discussions signal the possibility that the UK TDM exception may soon be expanded to include commercial purposes.
• How might tech companies respond to the accusations of copyright infringement that are being leveled against them?
• There are several cases of AI companies being sued due to potentially using copyrighted works to illegally train AI models or generate AI content.
• The United States Copyright Office recently issued a statement of policy on registration of works containing AI-generated material.

These firms could, for example, obtain licensing agreements to use copyrighted works in their training data. It’s been widely reported that this would be analogous to how, say, Spotify licenses music—albeit Yakov Livshits on controversial terms—in a way the original version of Napster didn’t. Drake, for example, could license out his discography so fans can conjure Drake-like AI croonings of their own.

💬 Empathy and collaboration between authors and AI developers are vital in finding ethical solutions. In the dynamic world of Generative AI, the question of copyright and royalties presents a complex challenge where empathy and collaboration are essential. We are seeking an attorney to join our commercial finance practice in either our Stamford, Hartford or New Haven offices.

Photography, for instance, was also an invention that altered our understanding of human creation back in the 1800s when it first emerged. This new paradigm means that companies need to take new steps to protect themselves for both the short and long term. Reuters, the news and media division of Thomson Reuters, is the world’s largest multimedia news provider, reaching billions of people worldwide every day. Reuters provides business, financial, national and international news to professionals via desktop terminals, the world’s media organizations, industry events and directly to consumers. Thaler’s attorney, Ryan Abbott, on Monday said that he and his client strongly disagree with the decision and will appeal. The Copyright Office in a statement on Monday said it “believes the court reached the correct result.”

Thaler, the founder of Imagination Engines, an artificial neural network technology company, sued the office in June 2022 after its denial of his copyright application for A Recent Entrance to Paradise, a two-dimensional image of train tracks stretching beneath a verdant stone arch. Thaler said the work “was autonomously created by a computer algorithm running on a machine,” according to court documents. The Office wants input on whether new rules or regulation for generative AI are needed, along with the issues surrounding the use of “copyrighted works to train AI models, the appropriate levels of transparency and disclosure with respect to the use of copyrighted works, and the legal status of AI-generated outputs.” These data used in training the AI tool (training data) are scraped from the Internet, just like how humans “Google” a topic for inspiration through past works. More often than not, these training data consist of works from stock image libraries, and the way these copyright-protected works are used in training the AI have led to a number of high-profile lawsuits.

The underlying idea behind this approach is that fair use protections should only apply to works that take no more than necessary to achieve a transformative purpose. For example, while each Output Work may be unique, the generation process can result in Output Works that are substantially similar to Input Works. As a training set gets larger and more diverse, the risk of the “heart” of any one Input Work being copied by the Output Work is mitigated. To ascertain the transformative purpose, the prompts used to generate an Output Work should be scrutinized to ensure the Output Work sufficiently transforms any components copied from any single Input Work. For example, fair use would not apply if the Output Work was generated from only minimal prompting and the prompts would clearly generate a work that substantially copies a single Input Work, a single author of multiple Input Works or a style that is representative of a very narrow set of Input Works. This directly implies looking for intent through evidence embodied in the prompts—one can more easily imagine the prompt “write a story about a teenage wizard prodigy in the writing style of J.K.