AI vs. Copyright: Unraveling the Puzzle

The growth of tools such as ChatGPT, MidJourney, Adobe Firefly, Stability AI, and many more has raised two very prominent questions.

1. Whether a work created by an individual with the help of AI can be protected by law. Does that individual get the right to reproduce that work, sell it, license it, and sue another individual for unauthorized use of the work?

2. Is AI infringing on the rights of authors by using their work to get trained and using them to provide information to the users?

The world has taken a leap from reading books to obtain particular information to googling any information. Today, instead of reading through several articles on Google, people prefer to ask ChatGPT, where they have the freedom to tailor the type of information they need. one can guide the length of the information to a brief paragraph or an essay of several pages.

But from where do these Generative AIs get all that information? Technically speaking, they get trained on the data available on the internet, both publicly available data and copyrighted material.

Is there any law that can protect your material from being used without your permission?

An infringement can be filed in that case, but you need to be aware of how generative AIs have infringed on your creative rights and under which category your work falls.

Recently, a gross infringement was carried out by ChatGPT, where it copied a news article by The New York Times. In its allegation, The New York Times alleged that ChatGPT used several of its works without prior permission. The New York Times demands billions of dollars in compensation from OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.

The Work Created with help of Generative AI

Section 2 (d) of Indian Copyright Act 1957 defines Author as:

"Author" means,-

(1) In relation to a literary or dramatic work, the author of the work;

(2) In relation to a music work, the composer;

(3) In relation to artistic work other than a photograph, the artist;

(4) In relation to photograph, the person taking the photograph, the artist;

(5) In relation to a cinematograph film or sound recording, the producer; and

(6) In relation to any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer- generated, the person who causes the work to be created.

The Person who causes the work to be created, implies that author should a person even if the work generated on computer, it is understood that the term computer is both hardware and software.

At many occasions, courts around the world have rejected the work of Generative AI as copyrightable material. In 2020, an IP advocate in India registered a painting for copyright protection co-authored by RAGHAV, an AI. It was initially approved, only to be later rejected.

A similar incident occurred with the artist Kris Kashtanova, who created a graphic novel called "Zarya of Dawn" with the help of Midjourney, a generative AI that allows one to generate images by providing a writing prompt. The copyright was revoked by the United States Copyright Office (USCO).

Future:

We cannot be certain about how the future looks, but we can imagine it by analyzing recent trends. Many countries are rejecting the idea that intellectual property can be held by artificial intelligence. Some strict legal frameworks can be established to protect the intervention of AI, but we can also anticipate a scenario where laws are relaxed to allow individuals to unleash their creativity with the help of generative AI.