The Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled late last year that an AI-generated image in an intellectual property dispute was a new artwork protected by Chinese copyright law.
The decision is at odds with current U.S. copyright law that states an AI platform or owner can not create an original work or content that can be protected. It is expected have far-reaching implications for future AI copyright disputes, which reports the China Morning Post, “could eventually benefit Chinese Big Tech companies.”
BIC ruled in a November decision that an image generated via U.S. start-up StabilityAI’s text-to-image software, Stable Diffusion, should be considered an artwork under the protection of copyright laws based on the “originality” and intellectual input of its human creator, as reported in the The Post.
“The recent decision by the BIC presents an interesting and challenging dilemma,” Keith Kupferschmid, CEO of the Copyright Alliance, a non-profit that represents the copyright interests of over 2 million individual creators and over 15,000 organizations in the United States.
“The decision directly conflicts with the view held by the U.S. Copyright Office, which would, of course, be cause for concern. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. AI copyrightability issues are arising in more jurisdictions across the globe. When these decisions are inconsistent with one another it presents a challenge for both copyright owners and users. Knowing which AI-generated content is and is not copyright-protected can be confusing.”
Ownership, Fairness, Creativity
Generative AI responses and prompts are challenging our understanding of content and invention ownership, fairness and the very nature of creativity itself.
The U.S. Copyright Office released last year a sweeping policy change to provide guidance for all AI-human creative collaborations moving forward — a response to what it sees as new trends in registration activity.
“If a human simply types in a prompt and a machine generates complex written, visual or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ have been executed by AI, a non-human. Therefore, it is not protected by copyright.”
“The document essentially doubles down on its stance with Zarya of the Dawn,” reports BuiltIn, a Chicago-based blog for tech startups, businesses and creators. Zarya author, Kristina Kashtanova, employed the AI tool Midjourney to generate images within the graphic novel.
“Reiterating that the term ‘author’ is not extended to non-humans, including machines. It also states that if a human simply types in a prompt and a machine generates complex written, visual or musical works in response, the ‘traditional elements of authorship’ have been executed by AI, a non-human. Therefore, it is not protected by copyright.”
In August, a U.S. district court ruled that AI-generated artwork cannot be copyrighted after a series of suits initiated by US scientist Stephen Thaler, who sought recognition for his self-developed AI system to be declared as the author of an image that it generated.
“In the same month, China enacted the world’s earliest and most detailed regulations that cover all generative AI content services, writes the China Morning Post, “including text, pictures, audio and video – applying strict censorship rules on the content created.”
These regulations, however, had a relatively supportive tone for the technology, observes the publication, as authorities pledged “to take effective measures to encourage innovative development of generative AI”, with an “inclusive and prudent” attitude and a “graded” regulatory approach.
Blurry Lines
Lines get blurry when generative AI platforms and humans collaborate. It is inevitable that there will be a relationship between the two and it will be complicated. Expect it to grow.
Image source: Curtonews.com
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