October 08, 2022

AI and Copyright Law: How Copyright Applies to AI-Generated Content

40 minutes

In this fireside chat with attorney Ruth Carter, we dig into how copyright law applies to content created by artificial intelligence. Who owns these fabulous works of art generated by systems and models like OpenAI’s DALL-E or Stability.ai’s Stable Diffusion? What about blog content created by tools like GoCharlie or Copy.ai?

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Key highlights of the interview on AI and copyright law:

Copyrights protect original works of authorship that are fixed in a tangible medium. Trademarks protect names, logos, slogans, and other branding elements. Patents protect inventions.

The case Naruto vs Slater has established that only humans can hold copyrights, not monkeys or machines. This means that any content created purely by AI is automatically in the public domain and anyone can use it without permission.

If you create a work that is based on a public domain work, you can only claim copyright in the parts of your work that are original to you. You cannot claim copyright in the public domain work itself.

It is most likely that if you use an AI model to generate a work, and then copy and paste that work onto your blog, the work would be considered public domain.

You probably wouldn’t get copyright protection in what AI creates unless until you add in original work of authorship, your original thoughts, and then that would be protected by copyright.

If you create a blog post based on an outline, you still would probably have copyright in your resulting work, because you added your original thoughts to it.

There is no definitive answer on how to protect AI generated content, as the law has not yet caught up to the technology. However, one potential way to protect AI generated content is to claim it as a derivative work of something that is copyright protected. Another option is to put a water mark on the content to protect it as a trademark.

There is low legal risk for companies to publicly state that they use AI in their content generation. However, if someone were to challenge that company and say their content should be in the public domain, the company would need to be prepared to defend their position.

Companies should document their content creation process to show that humans are involved in the process and to avoid any claims that AI created the entire content.

If a machine generates an image that looks similar to you, it’s not copyright infringement if you didn’t specifically copy it.

If you’re creating content with AI, you should have humans substantially involved in the process to avoid copyright issues.

To engage Ruth’s services as an attorney, visit their website at GeekLawFirm.com.

Disclaimer:

This interview does not constitute legal advice or create a client-attorney relationship with anyone.

The information contained in this interview is presented on an “as is” basis with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, usefulness, timeliness, or of the results obtained from the use of this information and without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, merchantability, or fitness for a particular purpose. While we have taken every reasonable precautio

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