Copyright in AI-generated works: Lessons from recent developments in patent law
This addresses the problem of determining copyright ownership for AI-generated works, which is an incremental legal analysis building on recent patent law developments.
The paper examines whether the AI-owner approach from patent law, which allows AI owners to claim rights over AI-generated inventions, can be applied to copyright law for AI-generated works. It argues that this approach offers more certainty and lower transaction costs compared to existing methods, though contracts may be used to adjust it for commercial exploitation.
In Thaler v The Comptroller-General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks (DABUS), Smith J. held that an AI owner can possibly claim patent ownership over an AI-generated invention based on their ownership and control of the AI system. This AI-owner approach reveals a new option to allocate property rights over AI-generated output. While this judgment was primarily about inventorship and ownership of AI-generated invention in patent law, it has important implications for copyright law. After analysing the weaknesses of applying existing judicial approaches to copyright ownership of AI-generated works, this paper examines whether the AI-owner approach is a better option for determining copyright ownership of AI-generated works. The paper argues that while contracts can be used to work around the AI-owner approach in scenarios where users want to commercially exploit the outputs, this approach still provides more certainty and less transaction costs for relevant parties than other approaches proposed so far.