There seem to be some court decisions that AI-generated material cannot have copyright. And I guess there are or will be decisions that AIs can’t be held responsible for outcomes, such as accidents from self-driving cars. People seem to be worried that this will slow down progress. But I think there is a potentially easy way out that is relatively general: Corporates. The law in most countries allows legal persons that are not natural persons to take responsibility and to own stuff. Justlet the AI control the corporation or at least route all AI actions thru the corporation. This should easily work for cases such as copyright material, though I’m not sure one can get the action cycle short enough for self-driving cars.
If I paint a picture using a brush, the copyright is not split between me and the brush; it is all mine. So I guess the idea is to treat the AI as a sophisticated powerful brush. Which makes sense, but less and less, as the role of the human is gradually reduced to merely pressing the “do it” button. (However, I could totally imagine a magical brush like that in anime, and they would probably also assign the copyright to the user if they cared about such things.)
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that different countries have different fundamental ideas about authorship protection. In USA, it is literally a “copy right”—a right to make copies and allow other people to make copies, regardless of who was the author. You can sell the copyright, and actually if you work for a corporation, it is probably a part of your contract that everything you make (including in your free time) belongs to the corporation.
Some countries instead have a concept of “author rights”, which cannot be transferred to another person; other people or corporations can only get a permission to do certain things.. which may be an exclusive permission, in which case it can be in practice quite similar to buying the rights… but sometimes the law sets certain limits to contracts, for example a certain minimum amount of money is required for each copy made, or the author can withdraw the permission later (and any contract that contradicts this is automatically invalid legally). In other words, the law prevents using a fixed amount of money to acquire unlimited use of the product forever.
Then again, the law evolves, corporate lawyers can find clever workarounds against what the law originally intended, and most authors do not want to take a legal battle against someone more experienced who can afford it.
I don’t disagree with this, but I think it goes in a different direction from what I had in mind.
For the brush example to work, you need someone to use the rush—at least push a button, a recognizable “action” to which responsibility, authorship etc. can be tied. That is not present in many ways AI is or will be used—self-driving cars, AI that generates unsupervised. That’s what I was thinking about.
There seem to be some court decisions that AI-generated material cannot have copyright. And I guess there are or will be decisions that AIs can’t be held responsible for outcomes, such as accidents from self-driving cars. People seem to be worried that this will slow down progress. But I think there is a potentially easy way out that is relatively general: Corporates. The law in most countries allows legal persons that are not natural persons to take responsibility and to own stuff. Justlet the AI control the corporation or at least route all AI actions thru the corporation. This should easily work for cases such as copyright material, though I’m not sure one can get the action cycle short enough for self-driving cars.
If I paint a picture using a brush, the copyright is not split between me and the brush; it is all mine. So I guess the idea is to treat the AI as a sophisticated powerful brush. Which makes sense, but less and less, as the role of the human is gradually reduced to merely pressing the “do it” button. (However, I could totally imagine a magical brush like that in anime, and they would probably also assign the copyright to the user if they cared about such things.)
I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that different countries have different fundamental ideas about authorship protection. In USA, it is literally a “copy right”—a right to make copies and allow other people to make copies, regardless of who was the author. You can sell the copyright, and actually if you work for a corporation, it is probably a part of your contract that everything you make (including in your free time) belongs to the corporation.
Some countries instead have a concept of “author rights”, which cannot be transferred to another person; other people or corporations can only get a permission to do certain things.. which may be an exclusive permission, in which case it can be in practice quite similar to buying the rights… but sometimes the law sets certain limits to contracts, for example a certain minimum amount of money is required for each copy made, or the author can withdraw the permission later (and any contract that contradicts this is automatically invalid legally). In other words, the law prevents using a fixed amount of money to acquire unlimited use of the product forever.
Then again, the law evolves, corporate lawyers can find clever workarounds against what the law originally intended, and most authors do not want to take a legal battle against someone more experienced who can afford it.
I don’t disagree with this, but I think it goes in a different direction from what I had in mind.
For the brush example to work, you need someone to use the rush—at least push a button, a recognizable “action” to which responsibility, authorship etc. can be tied. That is not present in many ways AI is or will be used—self-driving cars, AI that generates unsupervised. That’s what I was thinking about.