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USPTO Questions if Artificial Intelligence Can Create or Infringe Copyrighted Works
The USPTO is part of the US Department of Commerce and deals with various intellectual property rights issues. It previously raised questions on how AI technology impacts patent law and is now expanding this to copyright matters.
The consultation starts off by asking whether anything created by an AI, without human involvement, can be copyrighted. This can refer to any type of content, including music, images, and texts.
"Should a work produced by an AI algorithm or process, without the involvement of a natural person contributing expression to the resulting work, qualify as a work of authorship protectable under U.S. copyright law? Why or why not?" the Office asks.
The technology and code that makes any AI work obviously relies on human interaction, but USPTO's question is destined to raise a lively debate. Since it's expected that more and more creations will rely heavily on AI in the future, the US Government requests guidance on these issues.
In a follow-up question, the Office zooms in further still by asking what kind of human involvement is required to make something copyrightable. Yet another question deals with possible copyright infringements by an AI. Or in other words, can an AI pirate?
The comment period closes on Dec. 16.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 12 2019, @05:39AM (3 children)
Of the misuse of the term "Artificial Intelligence."
When most people hear "AI" they're thinking about something like HAL9000 or the Terminator.
Those don't actually exist. And won't for a very long time, if ever. That type of AI is more properly termed "Artificial General Intelligence" or "Strong AI."
We don't have that. What we have should more properly be termed "Expert Systems."
But those hawking their expert systems want to give the marketing illusion that they are a general intelligence, not just software (either directly written or "trained") to perform specific tasks.
When you use the term "expert system," the answers to the questions posed in TFS become pretty obvious.
Those who own/operate such expert systems likely have some IP rights to the agglomerations "created" by such systems, and any "piracy" is the responsibility of those same owner/operators.
That the USPTO would even engage in such a discussion just goes to show how incorrectly this stuff is interpreted based on a marketing term.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 12 2019, @10:03AM
I prefer the term multivariate analysis algorithm. Expert system is already going too far for me...
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:21PM (1 child)
The term "expert system" doesn't match the current system either. An expert system is quite narrowly defined as an information processing tool to be operated by a domain expert. It specifically excludes unsupervised decision making.
Or rather, that's what it used to mean. Like "Artificial Intelligence" used to be narrowly defined as what you're now calling AGI.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @09:28PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system [wikipedia.org]