Abstract:
The rapid progress of generative AI (GenAI) has opened fascinating discussions about creation and authorship. Where does the machine begin and the human stop in works generated by algorithms? Is AI capable of creating and producing emotions, meanings, or beauty? In other words, is there an aesthetics of algorithmic creation?
The crisis extends to the claims of infringement and compensation against the use of copyrighted works in the datasets and learning process on which GenAI relies. As GenAI only makes computational use of data and not a reproduction of the expression in the image, infringement actions might lack legal ground. Alternatively, copyright owners deploy a discourse that is not far from the argument of the value gap already heard for content-sharing platforms and article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive of 2019. The extraction of the value of works aggregated in masses, and not the copy of expression of singular works of authorship, is used to claim compensation. The notions, semantics, and narratives mobilised to support such claims arguably borrow from a logic of related rights instead of copyright.
GenAI ‘makes’ works in a way that does not fit with copyright law. Yet, the answers given by copyright claims and court decisions jeopardise the very notion of the work of authorship and could result in ‘un-making’ works and paradoxically destabilising the very regime of copyright as a protection of expressions, authorships, and creators.
About speaker:
Severine Dusollier is Professor of Intellectual Property in the Law School of Sciences Po Paris and holds a Senior Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the Vice-Dean for research of the Law School, member of its doctoral committee and the Head of the Master in Innovation Law. She is a Qualified Member of the CSPLA (French Copyright Council) and a founding member of the European Copyright Society. From 2014-2019, she was the holder of an ERC (European Research Council) research grant on commons and inclusivity in property. Her current research interests are digital issues of copyright, the concept of authorship, contractual protection of authors and performers, exceptions and limitations, commons and property, public domain. From 2006-2014, she was Professor at the University of Namur (Belgium) and the Director of the CRIDS (Research Centre in Information, Law and Society). Recognised as an academic expert in copyright, she has carried out research for international and EU institutions. She has been a Research Fellow at Berkeley University (2001), at the European University Institute of Florence (2005-2006), Visiting fellow at the University of Columbia (2011), NYU (2017) and LUISS (2021). She is also a regular Invited Professor at CEIPI at the University of Strasbourg.