Protection Of Copyright Laws For Artificial Intelligence: Challenges Of Authorship And Ownership

Kirti Minhas, Masters of Law at Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law, IIT Kharagpur

ABSTRACT

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are creative, independent, autonomous, rational, unpredictable, accurate, evolving with each passing day and the use of it is also increasing in our lives day by day. AI and machine learning has already reached to a point where we hear about independent driverless cars, AI lawyers who do the data analysis of cases and tell the probability of winning a cases, automated dispute resolution systems, automated contracts, social policymakers etc1. We have heard about the machines making original work of art, almost all the works that are copyrightable such as paintings, music, poetry, writing news, stories, literature etc. today it is impossible to imagine any of the work which an AI cannot produce. These developments obviously give rise to the issues of authorship, ownership and infringement of copyright for the automated AI. This paper will deal with the intersection of the autonomous AI systems and Intellectual Property Laws, mainly copyright regime.

Authorship is the most fundamental issue of copyright; ownership is also dependent on the authorship of the work. So, authorship of copyrightable works created by autonomous AI is a burning topic in the world. This paper will address the issue and talk about the ways of determining authorship and ownership of copyrighted work generated by AI as providing ownership rights is important for the future of the industry. No country till now has opened their copyright laws to include AI generated work explicitly. Human author is a requirement for all the protection of copyright law till now. But there are two ways of trying to talk about the authorship of AI generated work. First, we can define the term author and include AI into it and secondly we can define the employer- employee relationship between the AI and it’s generating humans or companies and then provide rights accordingly. The work for hire scenario is also explored in this paper where the AI would be a hired system to work or create. The paper address the question of copyright ability i.e. the ownership and authorship of the works generated by the autonomous AI.