March 8, 2022
Art, viewed throughout human history as one of the fundamental forms of human expression, cannot be machine-made or machine-conceived according to the US Copyright Office. The human consciousness behind creativity is a prerequisite to a work’s eligibility for copyright protection.
This issue garnered recent attention when Dr. Stephen Thaler, who attempted to copyright a work product of his Creativity Machine, which is run entirely on artificial intelligence, was once again denied by the USCO. The piece, entitled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, which features a haze of overgrown purple flowers that have grown over a tunnel intersected by railroad tracks, was created without any human manipulation.
Current copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor… founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind.” The USCO does not seem ready to stray from this principle, even in an age where computer thinking, 3D printing, and artificial intelligence are becoming more mainstream. A work that fails to evince the creative intervention of a human being, like A Recent Entrance to Paradise, is not well-positioned to convince the Office to “depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence.”
Among the Court’s reasons for denying the application was the uniform stance taken across the courts, including an appellate decision affirming a lower court’s denial of a copyright for a “selfie” photograph taken by a monkey in 2011. Courts in the United States are not alone in their position that copyright protection should be reserved for human-created works. The European Patent Office and UK Intellectual Property Office rejected applications from Dr. Thaler for DABUS, another AI that, like the Creativity Machine, he owns. South Africa and Australia have granted patent protection for AI-created inventions in recent years, including a South Africa patent for another of Dr. Thaler’s machines.
This development in the world of Intellectual Property and Copyright is one to watch as AI becomes a more integrated part of our everyday lives, but for now, Copyright law requires the influence of human beings on potentially protected works.
To read more about this issue, see the original article from The Verge, here.
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