Intellectual Property
Does GenAI violate copyrights? Can a work produced using GenAI be copyrighted? Can AI invent? At present, there are more questions than answers in the quagmire that is the legion of IP issues surrounding GenAI.
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The USPTO has announced that AI-assisted inventions can be patented if a human provides a significant contribution, including being an inventive prompter. The guidance instructs examiners to apply the "significant contribution" test to determine inventorship. The full official guidance will be released tomorrow. This policy measure aims to incentivize innovation and leverage the capabilities of generative AI.
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are being sued for allegedly violating copyright law by reproducing open-source code using AI. But the suit could have a huge impact on the wider world of artificial intelligence.
Are text-to-image AI legal? It’s a hard question to answer.
Existing foundation models are trained on copyrighted material. Deploying
these models can pose both legal and ethical risks when data creators fail to
receive appropriate attribution or compensation. In the United States and
several other countries, copyrighted content may be used to build foundation
models without incurring liability due to the fair use doctrine. However, there
is a caveat: If the model produces output that is similar to copyrighted data,
particularly in scenarios that affect the market of that data, fair use may no
longer apply to the output of the model. In this work, we emphasize that fair
use is not guaranteed, and additional work may be necessary to keep model
development and deployment squarely in the realm of fair use. First, we survey
the potential risks of developing and deploying foundation models based on
copyrighted content. We review relevant U.S. case law, drawing parallels to
existing and potential applications for generating text, source code, and
visual art. Experiments confirm that popular foundation models can generate
content considerably similar to copyrighted material. Second, we discuss
technical mitigations that can help foundation models stay in line with fair
use. We argue that more research is needed to align mitigation strategies with
the current state of the law. Lastly, we suggest that the law and technical
mitigations should co-evolve. For example, coupled with other policy
mechanisms, the law could more explicitly consider safe harbors when strong
technical tools are used to mitigate infringement harms. This co-evolution may
help strike a balance between intellectual property and innovation, which
speaks to the original goal of fair use. But we emphasize that the strategies
we describe here are not a panacea and more work is needed to develop policies
that address the potential harms of foundation models.
Two U.S. authors sued OpenAI in San Francisco federal court on Wednesday, claiming in a proposed class action that the company misused their works to "train" its popular generative artificial-intelligence system ChatGPT.
In the eight months since the public release of ChatGPT4 the business and legal press have been captivated by its current skills and its potential for future applications. Here, Peter Brown discusses the legal theories asserted in several recent litigations involving Generative AI, with a specific focus on the copyright claims in 'Sarah Silverman v. OpenAI.'
The machines aren’t coming for your job — they’re here to help. But when humans work with artificial intelligence (“AI”) assistance, who owns the final product?
Artificial intelligence (AI) models are transforming industries and the workplace. While few companies will create AI models from scratch, most will find themselves licensing AI models from others.
The paper of record pokes holes in the absorb-everything AI business model.
A judge has dismissed the majority of copyright claims made by book authors against OpenAI's ChatGPT. The decision is in favor of OpenAI and rejects the claims made by the authors. The article provides more details on the case.
Comedian Sarah Silverman is one of three people suing OpenAI, the company behind AI chatbot ChatGPT for copyright infringement.