A photo taken by a monkey in 2011 has become the unexpected starting point for one of the most consequential legal debates in the age of artificial intelligence. There is a fundamental question at stake: When a machine makes art, who owns it?
United States courts have now declared that there are no copyrightable rights to AI-generated works. There will be fundamental changes to the legality of AI-generated music and movies and digital content creation and commercial use as courts begin to deny copyright protection to AI-generated works.
AI copyright law has its roots in the monkey selfie case
There was controversy around the world when an interesting photo was taken by British photographer David Slater using a camera set by a crested black macaque. As this picture became popular on the internet, questions started being raised about who has the copyright on it.
The Wikimedia Foundation claimed that the image was part of the public domain because there was no human author behind its creation. The US Copyright Office supported the Wikimedia Foundation’s claim, saying that it would not grant any copyrights to non-human authors.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) brought a legal case on behalf of the monkey to try to assert copyright, but their case was dismissed.
A few years later, similar discussions resurfaced in a case revolving around a computer scientist named Stephen Thaler who requested copyright for images created by an AI system called Dubus, stating that Dubus was the sole creator.
However, the United States Copyright Office rejected the request, stating that authorship required some form of human contribution. The case reached the Supreme Court, but there was no review, thus confirming that works that do not involve any human contribution cannot be owned by AI systems.
The decision will have a major impact on both the entertainment and technology sectors as companies need copyright protection to achieve full monetization of their AI-generated movies and music and books.
Experts argue that this limits the possibility of a future dominated entirely by machine-made materials. People will use AI as a creative tool that helps them in their work rather than making them obsolete as artists.
The United Kingdom and other countries have established copyright systems that allow people to own specific machine-generated creations. The development of generic AI technology requires a thorough review of existing frameworks. The upcoming legal dispute will focus on hybrid works that involve human-AI creative partnerships. Courts will need to establish what amount of human contribution must be present for people to obtain ownership rights.
