Artificial Intelligence Lacks Personhood To Become The Author Of An Intellectual Property

Traditionally, humans are supposed to have intelligence and create innovative or novel work capable of being recognized to be registered as intellectual property and the same belief has been reflected in the legislators of the IP laws. Legitimacy Challenge to IP generated by AI Indian Copyright Act, 1957 Section 2 defines author to include, “in relation to any literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work that is computer-generated, the person who causes the work to be created”. The United Kingdom’s Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 Section 9, states, “In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.” Section 178 of the CDPA, has defined computer-generated work, as “generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. The Plaintiff then filed for a reconsideration of his application contesting that AI systems should be acknowledged as an author where it otherwise meets the criteria for authorship, but this application was also rejected by the Copyright Office with the rationale that, “because copyright law is limited to ‘original intellectual conceptions of the author’, the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work”, the Plaintiff then made another request for reconsideration with the same reasoning as the previous reconsideration letter, and it was again refused by the Copyright Office Review Board on the grounds that ‘copyright protection does not extend to the creations of non-human entities’. In concluding the discussion in this case, the court held that, “the work at issue did not give rise to a valid copyright upon its creation’, and ‘the image autonomously generated by the plaintiff’s computer system was never eligible for copyright’, upholding the decision of the Register in denying copyright registration to a ‘work created absent any human involvement’”.