ΟΜΙΛΗΤΕΣ

Post-doctoral Researcher on AI and Copyright Law, School of Law, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

Title of Paper: 
Copyright Law in the Era of Computational Creativity: Which protection for machine-generated creations?

Subdisciplinary Area: Copyright Law, Artificial Intelligence

Keywords: Copyright, machine learning, machine creativity, authorship, machine-generated art, algorithmic creativity

Abstract:  Continental Copyright Law is traditionally characterized by its human-centered approach. The legislator admits that the privilege of creativity is exclusively attached to the human mind. Accordingly, copyright law grants a monopolistic right on the (original) output of the creative process in favour of the human-creator in the first place. As a consequence, copyright protection, according to the current regime, requires a creative causality between the (human) creator and its creation.
The recent expansion of artificial intelligence and its application in the field of creativity and the arts challenges the application of copyright law, especially in cases where the causal creative proximity between (human) creator and the creative output is lacking. This happens in the case of creations that are autonomously generated by machines, ie. generated with limited or without human creative contribution.  
The present paper aims at presenting the status of such machine-generated works from a copyright law perspective, before expressing some thoughts on possible options in view of the adaptation of the human-centered continental copyright law in the forthcoming machine-centered era of artificial intelligence.