Ryan Merkley, Lawfare; On AI-Generated Works, Artists, and Intellectual Property
"Today’s laws allow only humans to create a new copyright. So far, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has trod lightly to avoid declaring any wholly computer-generated work eligible for copyright. In the coming years, there will be enormous pressure on lawmakers to allow computer-generated works to be eligible for copyright. If there is a line in the sand to be drawn, it’s between humans and computers. Rather than allow computer art to devalue human works, one solution might be to elevate human art and decide that AI art should never have equal value.
Legal frameworks worldwide rely on laws written sometimes hundreds of years ago before computers even existed. Beyond those laws, there are moral and ethical questions that remain unanswered. What is the good we hope to create, and what are the harms that might result? What kind of competitive market do we want, and who, or what, will we be competing with?...
If copyright laws were bent to allow algorithms to become authors, it would upend one of the foundational principles of global intellectual property and just might unleash a torrent of new issues so overwhelming that it could spell the end of international treaties like the Berne Convention, already creaking under the weight of the internet."
