Intellectual Property Protection and Artificial Intelligence
Publication date: January 03, 2025
Today, thanks to access to artificial intelligence, people can significantly speed up and streamline their work. Moreover, AI’s existence greatly facilitates work in fields where a person may lack knowledge or has only a very narrow understanding. Nowadays, anyone who inputs the right command into an AI program can generate texts, sounds, videos, or graphics. Whereas in the past, this required the professions of copywriters, film editors, or graphic designers, today their role is not as crucial. However, a question arises—who owns a work generated by AI? Is a text written by an advanced language model the intellectual property of the person who provided the prompt?
The Monkey Selfie
To explore this issue further, one should refer to the case of the famous “monkey selfie”, where similarities can be observed regarding authorship and intellectual property in situations where the traditional creator is not clearly defined. The “monkey selfie” case involved a photo taken by the macaque monkey Naruto, who accidentally pressed the shutter button of photographer David Slater’s camera. The photo quickly became popular online, and the issue of its copyright sparked a heated legal debate. Ultimately, the court ruled that copyright did not belong to the monkey, as animals cannot be subjects of copyright law, nor directly to the photographer, who was not the creator of the actual photo despite providing the equipment.
