ABSTRACT
As artificial intelligence algorithms (AIs) become ever more powerful and sophisticated, they are becoming capable of generating audio and visual works that human audiences might typically regard as ‘music’ or ‘art’. This begs the question, can these AI-created works be granted copyright protection in the US? Should they be granted the same copyright protections as human-created works? If AI-generated works are copyrightable, what are the legal and policy implications? Similarly, AIs can now devise novel and non-obvious solutions to known problems. The first patent applications have been filed in the UK and elsewhere, naming an AI as an inventor. Can AIs be ‘inventors’ under US Patent laws? This is one of a dozen questions the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has recently raised for public comment about AI inventions in the US. Are we on the cusp of a new era that extends intellectual property protection to computer-created ‘music’, ‘art’, and ‘inventions’? Or is it more likely that we will conclude that these protections are exclusively available to the products of human creation?
Mammen, Christian and Richey, Carrie, AI and IP: Are Creativity and Inventorship Inherently Human Activities? (November 15, 2019), FIU Law Review, volume 14, issue 2, 2020, doi.org/10.25148/lawrev.14.2.9.
Leave a Reply