AI can’t “author” copyrightable works
AI can’t “author” copyrightable works
A computer scientist’s years-long quest to obtain copyright protection for a work created by artificial intelligence (AI) recently landed in a federal appellate court. The applicant was hoping for a result different from the initial denial, two administrative reviews, and a federal district court ruling. However, the results mirrored those decisions.
Lacking human touch
According to the applicant, the work was autonomously created by AI, without any creative contribution from a human. He sought to register the work as its owner, with the “Creativity Machine” that generated it listed as the sole author.
The U.S. Copyright Office denied registration because the work lacked human authorship. The applicant requested reconsideration, and the result was the same. The applicant then submitted a second request for reconsideration. The review board rejected the application and a federal district court affirmed the denial, prompting an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Processing text
The Copyright Act requires all work to be authored by a human being. The appeals court acknowledged that the statute doesn’t define the word “author,” but it found that “traditional tools of statutory interpretation” show that the term refers only to human beings.
The court highlighted the text of multiple provisions in the law that indicate that authors must be humans, not machines. Many of the Copyright Act’s provisions, the court said, make sense only if an author is a human being. For example, the ownership provision is based on the author’s legal capacity to hold property; therefore, an entity that can’t own property can’t be an author under the law.
The act also limits the duration of a copyright to the author’s lifespan or a period that approximates a human lifespan. The Copyright Office maintains records related to the death of authors of copyrighted works so it can determine when copyrights expire.
In addition, the law’s inheritance provision refers to surviving spouses and heirs. Copyright transfers require a signature. Authors are protected regardless of their “nationality or domicile.” None of these make sense for machines. Where the law does refer to machines, it refers to them as authors’ tools.
Further, before the passage of the Copyright Act of 1976, the Copyright Office consistently interpreted the word to mean a human. The court therefore inferred that Congress adopted that long-standing interpretation when it included the term in the statute.
Unanswered queries
Importantly, the court noted that the Copyright Office has granted copyrights on works created by human authors who used AI. But the question of the permissible degree of AI contribution wasn’t necessary here because the AI was identified as the sole author. And, as the court said, such line-drawing should be left to Congress.
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