Generative AI and Intellectual Property Rights
J.M.M. Smits, Tijn Borghuis · Information technology and law series/Information technology & law series · 2022
Since the inception of AI, researchers have tried to generate novel worksWork in media ranging from musicWorksMusic through text to images. The quality of worksWork produced by generativeAIGenerative AI-systems is starting to reach levels that make them usable in contexts where until now human creations are employed. In addition, new contexts are emerging in which humans unskilled in a creative domain can generate worksWork by cooperating with generative AI-toolsAITools. GenerativeAIGenerative AI could lead to an abundance of individually customized content, where worksWork are generated for a particular user in a specific situation and presented once, perhaps never to be repeated again. These developments challenge core concepts of Intellectual Property Rights: “authorship”Authorship obviously, but also “work”Work. Although the content produced by generative systems is new, these systems are often trained on a corpus of (parts of) existing worksWork produced by humans. Hence, practices of (un)authorised imitation need to be considered. In this chapter we want to study these questions, which are emerging in all creative domains, with generativeAIGenerative AI for musicWorksMusic as the central example.