Artificial Intelligence

• Copyright is a basic constitutional right afforded to all citizens. The constitution states that the government shall provide "for limited times authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8
• The right provided is essentially a bundle of permissions allowing the owner the ability to control who can sell, copy, distribute, translate, edit, and perform your works.

Copyright & Intellectual Property LibGuide (CSUN Library's Guide on Copyright & Intellectual Property)

*AI generated materials do not currently receive copyright protections in the United States.  

*Use may be determined by the terms of use or terms and conditions of the GAI tool.

*If the terms of use do not address further uses of material generated by the GAI tool, then you are free to use the material.

*Some environments and publication arenas require full attribution for images and text that have been generated with AI.

• Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment

  Microsoft Copyright Copilot Commitment clearly establishes that there are no restrictions of GAI created materials.

Currently, copyright protection is not granted to works created by AI. 

• US Copyright Office and Artificial Intelligence

  "The Copyright Office has launched an initiative to examine the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI) technology, including the scope of copyright in works generated using AI tools and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. "

• Copyright Registration Guidance

  Guidance for registering Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence by the U.S. Copyright Office

• USPTO’s Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions.

  “This guidance explains that while AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable, the inventorship analysis should focus on human contributions, as patents function to incentivize and reward human ingenuity.”

Some AI image and text generation tools have been trained on material scraped from web pages without the consent or knowledge of the web page owners.

Several law suits claim that the use of artists’ or writers' content, without permissions, to train generative AI is an infringement of copyright.

With no decision reached, there is no definitive answer on whether the training of AI models is considered an infringement of copyright.  However, several experts have pointed to previous fair use cases to justify a fair use argument for the use of various training data for AI image generation tools.

• AI litigation database at George Washington University

  “This database presents information about ongoing and completed litigation involving artificial intelligence, including machine learning.”

• Klosek, K. & Blumenthal, M. (2024). Training Generative AI Models on Copyrighted Works Is Fair Use. Association of Research Libraries Blog.

  A discussion on whether the training of GAI on copyrighted works should be considered fair use.

• Library Copyright Alliance. (2023) LCA Principles for Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.

  “On June 23, 2023, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) issued a statement outlining copyright and AI principles, asserting, “The existing U.S. Copyright Act, as applied and interpreted by the Copyright Office and the courts, is fully capable at this time to address the intersection of copyright and AI without amendment.””

• Valente, C., Stortz, M., Wong, A., Meredith, M. (2023) Recent Trends in Generative Artificial Intelligence Litigation in the United States. The National Law Review. 14(95).

  A review of various court cases involving AI, including several revolving around copyright.