Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

Abstract

Surprisingly, the copyright status of generative AI works is pretty straight forward in the US: no one owns the copyright. According to the United States Copyright Office (2023), “copyright can protect only material that is the product of human creativity. Most fundamentally, the term ‘author,’ which is used in both the Constitution and the Copyright Act, excludes non-humans.” This concept is not new as previous court cases had already established this ruling. In the 1884 court case Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony, the defendant made copies of a photograph and claimed the author held no copyright since a machine, a camera, had created the works. However, the court disagreed, believing that the author who photographed the image factored in framing, positioning, lighting, and design of the subject; thus, it was deemed an “original work of art” (Burrow-Giles Lithographic Company v. Sarony, 1884).

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