How the “monkey selfie” is impacting copyright law for art and composing produced by expert system

Earlier this month, the United States Copyright Workplace and the World Intellectual Property Company co-sponsored a symposium titled Copyright in the Age of Expert System The function of the seminar was to take a look at “how the innovative community currently is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to develop original works,” and “what level of human input is sufficient for the resulting work to be qualified for copyright security,” among other subjects.

In his article for The Scholarly Kitchen, Todd A Carpenter checked out the discussion threads in WIPO’s public consultation and learned that the court choice concerning the well-known monkey selfie of 2011 might steer copyright law regarding works created by artificial intelligence.

Other websites, such as Wikipedia and Techdirt recreated the picture on their sites, that the professional photographer and PETA ultimately browsed in court to seek settlement as offense of copyright. Whether the photographer might assert copyright in the picture was eventually dismissed by the Ninth Circuit court of appeals in2018

In the Copyright Workplace’s Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, launched on 22 December, 2014, the Office stated that, “just works developed by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which omits photographs and artwork produced by animals or by devices without human intervention” and moreover, “Because copyright law is restricted to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author,’ the [copyright] workplace will decline to sign up a claim if it identifies that a human being did not produce the work. The Workplace will not sign up works produced by nature, animals, or plants.” What is left open to large interpretation is the function of human intervention. When it comes to AI, so the argument goes, there is human intervention in the design of the algorithms, in their training, and in their post-algorithm curation.

( Image: Mirko Tobias Schäfer, CC BY 2.0)