On November 27, 2023, the Beijing Internet Court (BIC) ruled in an infringement lawsuit (Li v. Liu) that an AI-generated image is copyrightable and that a person who prompted the AI-generated image is entitled to the right of authorship under Chinese Copyright Law (see our bilingual version, and the later-released official translation). Plaintiff generated an…
The ongoing Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution has machine learning models at its core. Contrary to classic computer programs written by developers, many of these models rely on vast artificial neural networks trained in giant amounts of data. In general, they use what is called a transformer architecture. No one individually writes or encodes these models;…
Copyright protection in machine-generated works is not a new issue for law makers. The traditional concept of human authorship was first challenged with the emergence of photography and this has continued every time a new technology comes about. In the U.S., the case of Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53 (1884) extended copyright…
Recently, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, in line with several decisions of the U.S. Copyright Office’s Review Board, found that human creativity is the sine qua non of copyrightability, refusing to register a work lacking human creative involvement or control. In this way, the U.S. jurisprudence embraces the distinction between…
Welcome to the third trimester of the 2023 round up of EU copyright law! In this edition, we update you on what has happened between July and September 2023 in EU copyright law. The autumn has started with full speed – the courts and the policy makes have been very active. This round up series…
The intersection of Artificial intelligence and Intellectual Property is complex. It involves several IP rights, some of which overlap in some cases: copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets/confidential information, and the right of publicity (and similar rights with different names). The situation has increased in complexity now that not only the input but also the output…
Summary In the case of Wright & Ors v BTC Core & Ors [2023] EWHC 222 the High Court was faced with a technical copyright question about whether literary copyright can subsist in the file format used for the Bitcoin System (the “Bitcoin File Format”). Justice Mellor concluded that copyright could not subsist in the…
My university, like so many others, is offering prompt engineering lessons to both students and faculty. The same is true at high schools around the world from what I can see. Cool professors have already modified their exams to ask students to write a prompt that could be submitted to a Large Language Model (LLM). …
Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at the Columbia Law School Jane C. Ginsburg recently visited London, where she delivered her lecture in memory of a well-known legal scholar – Professor William (Bill) Rodolph Cornish. Described as “an intellectual property pioneer and modern legal historian”, his untimely death in January 2022 was a blow…
Recently, the German photographer Boris Eldagsen won a prestigious Sony World Photography Awards competition. After the winner was announced, the photographer disclosed that the image he submitted to the photography competition was generated through the use of an AI system and refused to accept the award. This has provoked a public discussion on whether AI…
