Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output?

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Citation: P. Bernt Hugenholtz, João Pedro Quintais (2021/10/04) Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output?.
DOI (original publisher): 10.1007/S40319-021-01115-0
Semantic Scholar (metadata): 10.1007/S40319-021-01115-0
Sci-Hub (fulltext): 10.1007/S40319-021-01115-0
Internet Archive Scholar (search for fulltext): Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output?
Wikidata (metadata): Q108854356
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Summary

Questions works crated with AI assistance meet EU standards for copyright protection. Key sentence:

In sum current EU copyright law, as interpreted by the CJEU, leaves room for the protection of AI-assisted output in a wide range of creative fields. As long as the output reflects creative choices by a human being at any stage of the production process, AI-assisted output is likely to qualify for copyright protection as a ‘‘work’’.

Proposes a 4 step test for whether an AI-assisted work would be subject to EU copyright law:

  1. Production in literary, scientific or artistic domain - passing this test will be unproblematic for AI-assisted works
  2. Human intellectual effort - the question is to what extent is necessary for a human to be involved, however remote
  3. Originality/creativity (creative choice) - most crucial criterion, with emphasis on existence of sufficient creative space, including at the conception phase (before execution and redaction) rather than creativity of a production
  4. Expression - general authorial intent, free creative choices, without respect to merit of work

However, this does not mean that AI-created works that leave little room for human creative choice (examples given of AI-generated weather reports and possibly natural language transformers with little human input).

Also considers multiple authors, potential differences with Irish and UK law that may require even less human creative control.