EU copyright law does not protect AI-generated content, experts say
Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU
EU copyright law does not protect content entirely generated by AI, according to legal experts and recent court rulings. Daniel J. Gervais, a copyright scholar, says putting your name on an AI-written article gives you liability, not copyright. A Munich court held that AI-generated logos lack protection, as mere prompting isn't a human creative contribution.
When you put your name on an article that's written by ChatGPT or Claude, you're basically putting a provenance mark on it saying: I take responsibility for this. I haven't written it, but I'm putting my name on it. That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content
- t-writescode
This matches historical precedent in other nations where copyright was not extended to a photographer when a primate took a photo of themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- pizzly
As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
- socalgal2
So this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.
- kstenerud
This post is glossing over most of the nuance in EU law.
The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI.
This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
- Lazare
Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German.
They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way).
If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc.
Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider:
If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version.
If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation.
So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the […]
- hn_submit
Does this also extend to generated source code? I mean, this upend the business models of many A.I. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition, many ISVs would probably stop using A.I. if their products could lose their copyright.
And what about A.I. generated code which has been altered by a human? Is the derived work copyrightable?
- zmmmmm
it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection?
But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:
- I wrote the prompt (not enough)
- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)
- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
- apatheticonion
Does this mean someone could develop a switch emulator using an AI and Nintendo couldn't win a lawsuit against them?
Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games?
It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat