(CN) — In a landmark opinion over the copyrightability of works created by artificial intelligence, a D.C. Circuit panel ruled on Tuesday that human authorship is required for copyright protection.
As AI technology quickly advances and intertwines with human creations, the unanimous opinion lays down the first precedential marker over who or what is the author of work created solely by artificial intelligence under copyright law.
The case stems from Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist who creates and works with artificial intelligence systems and created a generative artificial intelligence named the “Creativity Machine.”
When the Creativity Machine made a picture that Thaler titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” he submitted a copyright registration application for the work to the U.S. Copyright Office in May 2019.
Thaler's application was denied after he listed the Creativity Machine software as the artwork’s sole author and himself as just the work’s owner.
"As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being," U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia A. Millett wrote in Tuesday's opinion.
"Dr. Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s application," the Barack Obama appointee added.
While the court sided with the U.S. Copyright Office by finding that human authorship is required for copyright registration, Thaler argued that position could create or reinforce perceptions in creative industries that AI’s contributions to work can be freely copied.
Thaler argued judicial opinions “from the Gilded Age” could not settle the question of whether computer-generated works are copyrightable today, but Millet stressed that the Copyright Office adopted the human authorship requirement in 1973 in response to rapidly developing and more sophisticated emerging technology.
Millet also emphasized the undermining roots of the Copyright Act, which incentivizes individuals to undertake the effort of creating original works that otherwise would be easily plagiarized.
She noted the act's language compels human authorship as it limits the duration of a copyright to the author’s lifespan or to a period that approximates how long a human might live. When the law discusses machines, the context further indicates that machines are tools and mechanisms to assist authors, rather than as authors themselves, Millet wrote.
Congress specified that authors immediately own their copyrights, so an entity that cannot own property cannot be an author under the statute, the judge added.
"All of these statutory provisions collectively identify an 'author' as a human being. Machines do not have property, traditional human lifespans, family members, domiciles, nationalities, mentes reae, or signatures," Millet wrote.
"By contrast, reading the Copyright Act to require human authorship comports with the statute’s text, structure, and design because humans have all the attributes the Copyright Act treats authors as possessing. The human-authorship requirement, in short, eliminates the need to pound a square peg into a textual round hole by attributing unprecedented and mismatched meanings to common words in the Copyright Act," she added.
The panel declined to rule more broadly on whether or when an AI creation could give rise to copyright protection, instead simply rejecting Thaler's claim of entirely autonomous authorship. It did, however, specify that the human authorship requirement does not fully prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
Millet wrote that the rule requires only that the author of that work be a human being — the person who created, operated, or used artificial intelligence — and not the machine itself.
Whether a work made with artificial intelligence is registerable also depends on the circumstances around how the AI tool operates and how much of the author's input was used to create the final work.
"Those line-drawing disagreements over how much artificial intelligence contributed to a particular human author’s work are neither here nor there in this case," Millet wrote.
The panel also said it didn’t need to reach the Copyright Office’s argument that the Constitution itself requires human authorship of all copyrighted material.
Fellow Obama-appointed circuit judge Robert L. Wilkins and the Bill Clinton-appointed Judith W. Rogers, joined the opinion.
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Categories / APPEALS, TECHNOLOGY
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