Generative AI and US Intellectual Property Law
This addresses legal uncertainties for artists and content creators affected by AI-generated content, but it is incremental as it reviews existing law without proposing new solutions.
The paper examines whether generative AI systems or their developers infringe on human creators' intellectual property rights under current US law, noting that AI lacks independent IP rights and court rulings on infringement are inconsistent.
The rapidity with which generative AI has been adopted and advanced has raised legal and ethical questions related to the impact on artists rights, content production, data collection, privacy, accuracy of information, and intellectual property rights. Recent administrative and case law challenges have shown that generative AI software systems do not have independent intellectual property rights in the content that they generate. It remains to be seen whether human content creators can retain their intellectual property rights against generative AI software, its developers, operators, and owners for the misappropriation of the work of human creatives, given the metes and bounds of existing law. Early signs from various courts are mixed as to whether and to what degree the results generated by AI models meet the legal standards of infringement under existing law.