Aussie AI

AI Copyright Research

  • Last Updated 10 November, 2024
  • by David Spuler, Ph.D.

The use of AI brings with a number of legal issues related to copyright. AI-created works affect the copyright of writing, code, images, video, music, and any other computer-assisted creations.

Problems for the user include that AI output may not be copyrightable because it's not a human author, and that the AI could generate copyright-infringing results from a copyrighted source on which it was trained. Problems for the AI vendor include the right to train engines using copyrighted content under "fair use", along with all the copyright issues for their users.

This page discusses AI copyright issues in general, from a research perspective, about the theory and the law. Specific discussion of the copyright affecting this website, and your use of this website, is elsewhwere, such as in the Terms of Use. Furthermore, this information is not legal advice, is not specific to you, and you should seek professional legal advice about any of your concerns.

List of Copyright Issues

Some of the legal and ethical issues related to copyright and AI include:

  • Copyrightability of AI computer-only creations from Generative AI.
  • Copyrightability of AI modification of human-authored works (e.g. "Copilot" working styles).
  • Who owns the copyright? (assuming there is any)
  • Are AI creations a "derivative work"?
  • Derivative of what? Of the prompt? Of the training dataset? All vs part of the training dataset?
  • "Fair use doctrine" in using copyrighted material for AI model training.
  • Copyright infringement from AI output that is similar to copyrighted works.
  • Identical AI output created independently for two or more users.
  • Combinations of multiple copyrighted and non-copyrighted works in AI output.
  • Interaction of the "copyleft" licenses in content used for training.
  • Generated AI output that is very similar to "copyleft" content.
  • Use of AI-created generated works to train future AI models (i.e. zero human-authored inputs).
  • Cross-border multi-jurisidictional legal complexities for any of the above concerns.

For most of these issues, the answers to the question, in any jurisdiction, is probably currently: "unclear".

AI Vendor Copyright Policy Statements

Various large AI companies have public announcement in regards to the various AI copyright issues:

AI Copyright Infringement Lawsuits

Lawsuits have been filed alleging that ChatGPT's output infringes copyright of the authors whose works were used to train the AI model.

Articles on AI Copyright

Various press articles and online websites discuss the issues:

Research Papers on AI Copyright Concerns

Papers and articles on the legal issues in relation to AI copyright:

More AI Research

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