The copyright blogs these last few days have been full of a singular judgement in Thomson Reuters vs Ross Intelligence where a copyright infringement lawsuit was successful against a defendant who used copyrighted material to train an A.I. model.
One of the most interesting perspectives on the case is penned by Joe Meckes and Joseph Grasser of Squire Patton Boggs,
Discussion of when and whether facts or citations can be copyrightable, and re-using them is or isn't "fair use" came down to a couple of issues. The defendant, Ross Intelligence, was found to have copied Thomson Reuters' "headnotes" in order to develop a competing product for commercial exploitation.
The court's definition of minimal creativity -as reported by the legal IP Tech bloggers- was striking:
"The court rejected Ross Intelligence merger and scènes à faire arguments. Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble."
The case will most probably be appealed, and the judge's ruling may be overturned, but it is worth watching.
For now, it does not appear to have ramifications for writers, unless AI is trained on one prolific author's works, and is used to write to order a novel like this author's novels, and this AI-generated novel is monetized in competition with the original author.
Unless... it might affect creators of recipe books. If a recipe is a list of ingredients, a list of equipment, and a list of activities in the preferred order, there's not a lot of creativity in the bare facts. The creativity and copyrightability comes from the "expression" of those facts.
Coming back to my musings on where AI might cross the line, I wonder what would happen if someone commanded AI to write a version of the Bible with a happy ending, or if someone were to order AI to generate a gospel according to Judas Iscariot.
Has it been done already?
All the best,
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Since the Bible is in the public domain, there could hardly be a problem, unless the AI draws upon one particular recent (copyrighted) translation. Incidentally, an apocryphal "Gospel of Judas" does exist, although not a Gospel "according to" Judas.
ReplyDeleteMargaret, thank you. I assumed that the Bible was a safe, if somewhat controversial, example. I sometimes wonder if it is a bit like a Disney product, with revisions being published every ten years or so. As you surmise, I intended to refer to a recent translation. Probably, a gospel of Judas would explain why, in The Chosen, Judas is shown taking rival notes to those of Matthew. Mea culpa, I should have googled the topic, there are multiple books.
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