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The USPTO wants to know if artificial intelligence can own the content it creates
And it wants the public to weigh in
The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it's asking the public for opinions on the topic. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak.
The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it's legal to feed an AI copyrighted material.
It starts off by asking if output made by AI without any creative involvement from a human should qualify as a work of authorship that's protectable by US copyright law. If not, then what degree of human involvement "would or should be sufficient so that the work qualifies for copyright protection?"
Other questions ask if the company that trains an AI should own the resulting work, and if it's okay to use copyrighted material to train an AI in the first place. "Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works?" asks the office. "If so, how?"
The office, which, among other things, advises the government on copyright, often seeks public opinion to understand new developments and hear from people who actually deal with them. Earlier this year, the office similarly asked for public opinion on AI and patents.
"if it's really a push button thing, and you get a result, I don't think there's any copyright in that."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 19 2019, @01:06AM (5 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.
N.B.: The above comment [soylentnews.org] received a '+5 insightful' on 11 November when we had another article about the exact same notice to the Federal Register. [soylentnews.org] I expect at least that this time. Copypasta is hard work. Whew! ;)
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:59AM (1 child)
We have quantum computers becoming commercially available, I wouldn't bet your farm that someone hasn't built one capable of true AI.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 19 2019, @04:51PM
I'd bet the farm, six chickens and all rights to my life story that I'll be long dead before anything even approaching "strong AI" exists.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 19 2019, @01:54PM (2 children)
No. While expert systems surely still exist, most current AI systems are neural networks. The difference is, with expert systems you still have rules programmed by humans. With neural networks, you essentially fit a generic function with sufficiently many parameters to an example data set, and then extrapolate that fit to other data sets.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:05PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Tuesday November 19 2019, @05:07PM
Expert systems aren't limited to rules-based system. Machine learning is used quite a bit as well.
The name, "expert system" refers to their focus on a very narrow set of specific tasks. Like self-driving, image recognition, etc. machine learning/neural nets are used quite a bit for these tasks.
Your comment proves the thesis of my initial comment, that there's quite a bit of confusion about what "AI" is. Thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system. [wikipedia.org]
That'll teach me to preview before I submit. Oops.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr