On October 30, counsel for Dr. Stephen Thaler requested that the U.S. Supreme Court hold its Petition for Certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter until after the Court rules on the matter of the dismissal of Copyright Office Director Shira Perlmutter by the White House in May. As the letter states, “The Blanche and Slaughter cases… Read More
On October 9th, Dr. Stephen Thaler, a computer scientist and owner of the generative AI “Creativity Machine,” filed a petition for cert with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to overturn the DC Circuit opinion in Thaler v. Perlmutter. As discussed in several posts, Dr. Thaler’s machine independently and autonomously produced an image he titled “A… Read More
Last February, the U.S. Copyright Office rejected the registration application filed by Stephen Thaler for a visual work entitled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Thaler averred that the image was generated by an AI he designed called “Creativity Machine,” and on that basis, the Office affirmed the longstanding doctrine that copyright rights only attach to… Read More
Over the weekend, I had the privilege of participating in the 11th annual Mosaic Conference, organized by the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ) and hosted by Suffolk University Law School IP Center. Founded by Professor Lateef Mtima at Howard University, IPSJ’s mission is to “…examine intellectual property law and policy—as well as… Read More
If you follow copyright matters, it would be impossible not to read commentary proclaiming either that copyright is “dead” in the age of artificial intelligence or that confronting AI exposes copyright’s philosophical underpinnings as a convenient fiction. There is nothing new about copyright skeptics claiming that its humanist principles are a fiction, but now that… Read More
I have not added a copyright post here since March 19, when the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed in Thaler v. Perlmutter that works produced autonomously by generative AI (GAI) are not protected under U.S. copyright law. Although it is good to see the human authorship doctrine in copyright left undisturbed, it is a… Read More
In a decision that is unsurprising but important, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that “authors,” as defined in U.S. Copyright Act, are human beings and not machines that can autonomously generate works. I say unsurprising because nothing in history or statute should have led the court to any other conclusion, and indeed the… Read More
A common disparagement of copyright advocacy is that it is anti-technology. Despite overwhelming evidence that professional creators are early adopters of new technlogical developements, the talking point persists that enforcing the rights of creators can only “stifle innovation.” This “Luddite” critique of copyright rights was used to defend the predatory models of social and streaming… Read More
Last week, oral arguments were presented before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on the question of whether copyright protection is conditioned on human authorship. Dr. Stephen Thaler, developer of a Gen AI he calls “Creativity Machine,” submitted a visual work made entirely by that machine to the U.S. Copyright Office for registration in 2022.… Read More
The Chamber of Progress launched an initiative called the “Generate and Create” campaign to “defend fair use” and “promote AI creativity.” I don’t know whether they bought this campaign used from the basement of Fight for The Future or Electronic Frontier Foundation, but the following statement is worn-out rhetoric that sounds even weaker defending AI… Read More
Just as it is folly to anthropomorphize computers and robots, it is also unhelpful to discuss the implications of generative AI in copyright law by analogizing machines to authors.[1] In 2019, I explored the idea that “machine learning” could be analogous to human reading if the human happens to have an eidetic memory. But this… Read More
This is a response to “Paradise Rejected: A Conversation about AI and Authorship with Dr. Ryan Abbott” hosted by Professor Sandra Aistars at the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University School of Law. It was first published on the CPIP blog in conjunction with Professor Aistars’s post. On February… Read More