Public Symposium on AI and IP; United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Wednesday, March 27, 2024 10 AM - 3 PM PT/1 PM - 6 PM ET

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); Public Symposium on AI and IP

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Emerging Technologies (ET) Partnership will hold a public symposium on intellectual property (IP) and AI. The event will take place virtually and in-person at Loyola Law School, Loyola Marymount University, in Los Angeles, California, on March 27, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PT. 

The symposium will facilitate the USPTO’s efforts to implement its obligations under the President’s Executive Order (E.O.) 14110 “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The event will include representation from the Copyright Office, build on previous AI/Emerging Technologies (ET) partnership events, and feature panel discussions by experts in the field of patent, trademark, and copyright law that focus on:

1. A comparison of copyright and patent law approaches to the type and level of human contribution needed to satisfy authorship and inventorship requirements;
2. Ongoing copyright litigation involving generative AI; and 
3. A discussion of laws and policy considerations surrounding name, image, and likeness (NIL) issues, including the intersection of NIL and generative AI.

This event is free and open to the public, but in-person attendance is limited, so register early"

Generative AI in Games Will Create a Copyright Crisis; Wired, July 4, 2023

 WILL BEDINGFIELD, Wired; Generative AI in Games Will Create a Copyright Crisis

"As lame as this story is, it hints at a knotty copyright issue the games industry is only just beginning to unravel. I’ve created a story using my imagination—but to do that I’ve used an AI helper. So who wrote the tale? And who gets paid for the work?"

International Copyright Issues and Artificial Intelligence; U.S. Copyright Office, Webinar: Wednesday, July 26, 2023, 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. eastern time

 U.S. Copyright Office; International Copyright Issues and Artificial Intelligence Webinar

"The United States is not alone in facing challenging questions about artificial intelligence and its implications for copyright law and policy. On July 26, 2023, join the Copyright Office for a discussion on global perspectives on copyright and AI. Leading international experts will discuss how other countries are approaching copyright questions such as authorship, training, exceptions and limitations, and infringement. They will provide an overview of legislative developments in other regions and highlight possible areas of convergence and divergence involving generative AI.

This webinar is a part of the Copyright Office’s initiative to examine copyright law and policy issues raised by AI technology, including the scope of copyright in works generated using AI tools and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. For more on copyright and AI, visit copyright.gov/ai.

Time: July 26, 2023, 11:00 a.m.–1:00 p.m. eastern time

Speakers:

• Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School
• Andres Guadamuz, University of Sussex
• Bernt Hugenholtz, University of Amsterdam
• Matthew Sag, Emory University School of Law
• Luca Schirru, KU Leuven
• Marcus von Welser, Vossius
• Raquel Xalabarder Plantada, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
• Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Ono Academic College
• Peter Yu, Texas A&M University School of Law"

Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law; The Conversation, June 15, 2023

Robert Mahari JD-PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Jessica Fjeld, Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School, Ziv Epstein, PhD Student in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), The Conversation; ; Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law

"We’re part of a team of 14 experts across disciplines that just published a paper on generative AI in Science magazine. In it, we explore how advances in AI will affect creative work, aesthetics and the media. One of the key questions that emerged has to do with U.S. copyright laws, and whether they can adequately deal with the unique challenges of generative AI.

Copyright laws were created to promote the arts and creative thinking. But the rise of generative AI has complicated existing notions of authorship."

A terrible decision on AI-made images hurts creators; The Washington Post, April 27, 2023

Edward Lee, The Washington Post; A terrible decision on AI-made images hurts creators

"The Copyright Office’s position is wrong. It misunderstands authorship and ignores the copyright clause’s goal of promoting “progress” by offering authors incentives to create new works, including with new technologies.

Its decision also misunderstands the creative process."

ChatGPT: what the law says about who owns the copyright of AI-generated content; The Conversation, April 17, 2023

Sercan Ozcan, University of Portsmouth; Joe Sekhon, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, University of Portsmouth; Oleksandra Ozcan, Lecturer, University of Portsmouth, The Conversation; , ChatGPT: what the law says about who owns the copyright of AI-generated content

"The AI chatbot ChatGPT produces content that can appear to have been created by a human. There are many proposed uses for the technology, but its impressive capabilities raise important questions about ownership of the content.

UK legislation has a definition for computer-generated works. Under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 they are “generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. The law suggests content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) can be protected by copyright. However, the original sources of answers generated by AI chatbots can be difficult to trace – and they might include copyrighted works.

The first question is whether ChatGPT should be allowed to use original content generated by third parties to generate its responses. The second is whether only humans can be credited as the authors of AI-generated content, or whether the AI itself can be regarded as an author – particularly when that output is creative."

Rise of the machines: Copyright in a world of AI; Phoenix Business Journal, April 17, 2023

Daniel Restrepo – Fennemore, Phoenix Business Journal; Rise of the machines: Copyright in a world of AI

"Recognizing the blend of human and automated works

In remedying these conflicts, courts have a few options before them. Courts can declare all works using AI fall into the public domain on the grounds that they do not meet the creative, original or human-created requirements, or they could simply grant AI works copyright protection as a matter of course. However, the former would disincentivize AI development and the latter would disincentivize human creativity. 

The third and more likely solution is somewhere in the middle, granting limited protection in AI works based on the degree of human involvement. The Copyright Office has recently taken this approach regarding an application for the comic book “Zarya of the Dawn,” granting rights to the human author’s writing and arrangement of AI-generated drawings, but not to the AI drawings themselves. This gradient, while perhaps frustrating to those who want greater clarity, is useful in determining the rights in the final product."

Copyright And Artificial Intelligence; Intellectual Property Watch, January 30, 2018

Edward Klaris, Managing Partner, KlarisLaw and KlarisIP, Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia Law School, Intellectual Property Watch; Copyright And Artificial Intelligence

"If a software engineer programs a bot which can generate music, for example, the copyright belongs to the person who created a song by controlling the bot, not the engineer who fabricated the software, nor the bot itself. The monkey may have pushed the camera button, but the photographer owns the copyright.  That’s got to be the rule even in a world where the bot may be operating more on its own and with increasing artificial intelligence.  United States law needs to evolve to recognize that, although a person may rely even 100 percent on a machine to produce original work, the person is the author worthy of Constitutional protection.

Of course, there may well be cases that test this position going forward.  But, in an increasingly mechanized world, we must hold fast to the original principles of promoting “the progress of science and useful arts” by protecting human creativity and innovation."