Judges In The US Decide AI-Promised Art Work Can't Be Given Copyright

Judge of the United States District Court, Beryl A. Howell (photo: twitter @PopCrave)

JAKARTA - The Judge of the United States District Court, Beryl A. Howell, ruled on Friday August 18 that artwork produced by artificial intelligence (AI) could not becopied, as reported by The Hollywood Reporter.

The judge presided over the trial of the United States Copyright Office after the office refused to copyright Stephen Thaler of the image produced by the Creativity Machine algorithm he created.

Thaler has tried many times to get copyright to the image "as a work for the owner of Creativity Machine," which will list the authors as the creator of the work and Thaler as the owner of the artwork, but he continues to be rejected.

Following the office's last refusal last year, Thaler sued the Copyright Office, claiming that the refusal was "as something arbitrary, unexpected... and not in accordance with the law," Judge Howell did not see it so.

In its decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright was never given to works created "without guiding human intervention," adding that "human writing is the main prerequisite of copyright."

This has been proven in previous cases cited by the judge, such as the case of a monkey selfie. In comparison, Judge Howell noted a case in which a woman combined a book from a notebook she had filled with "words she believed were dictated to herself" by a supernatural "sound", which deserves copyright.

However, Hakim Howell admits that humans are "approaching new terrain in copyright," where artists will use AI as a tool to create new works. He wrote that this would create "challenging questions about how much human input is needed" to copyright AI-generated artworks, noting that AI models are often trained with pre-existing works.

Stephen Thaler plans to appeal the case. His lawyer, Ryan Abbot of Brown Neri Smith & Khan LLP, said, "We respectfully disagree with the court's interpretation of the Copyright Act," according to Bloomberg Law, which also reported a statement by the United States Copyright Office stating that they believed the court's decision was the right one.

No one really knows how US copyright law will develop in the context of artificial intelligence, but cases in court continue to grow.

Sarah Silverman and two other authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Meta earlier this year over the practice of data taking by their models, while another lawsuit by programmer and attorney Matthew Butterick claims that Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI's data taking was a software hijacking act.