The U.S. Patent Office decides whether AI has copyright for the content it creates

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) plans to find out if artificial intelligence can own what it produces and asks the public to give their opinion on this matter. Does AI have copyright to the content it creates?

“As AI becomes increasingly advanced, commonplace in the creative workflow, and capable of making its own material, the questions the office is posing have ceased being theoretical and will have to be answered”, — writes The Verge magazine.

Currently, the department is collecting information on the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark and other intellectual property. For this, 13 questions were prepared, starting with what happens if the AI creates a work that violates copyright and ending with whether it can be permitted to use copyrighted content for teaching AI.

The most important question is whether it is possible to consider as an author’s work what is created by artificial intelligence without human participation. If not, what degree of human participation “will or should be sufficient for the work to comply with copyright protection law?”.

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Other questions relate to whether the AI training company should own the generated content, and whether the authors should be recognized for this type of use of their works.

The USPTO, which advises the government on copyright issues, often conducts surveys among people. In this case, there are no answers to the questions raised in the legislation of any country in the world, but the problem exists.

The situation clears up a bit if to consider a certain product based on AI, where a person has to finish results.

“I think what’s protectable is conscious steps made by a person to be involved in authorship. But if someone uses an AI that spits out a result with a single click, that could be a different matter. My opinion is if it’s really a push button thing, and you get a result, I don’t think there’s any copyright in that”, — Zvi S. Rosen, lecturer at the George Washington University School of Law, said.