US Copyright Office Rejects Bid to Register AI-Generated Art
Publisher: Law360
December 15, 2023
Day Pitney Intellectual Property Partner Alex P. Garens was featured in the Law360 article, "US Copyright Office Rejects Bid to Register AI-Generated Art." Garens, head of the firm's Trademark, Copyright and Advertising practice group, and Attorney Sean Park were counsel for Ankit Sahni's request for reconsideration of the U.S. Copyright Office's Review Board to register his artwork titled "Suryast." The refusal was not surprising, as it was in line with the office's previous refusals to register artworks generated using AI software.
Garens stated that the board's decision seems crafted to justify its desired outcome and has "troubling implications," for creative industries utilizing AI powered assistive tools. He added, "Construing Suryast as a derivative work conveniently allows the analysis to disregard the human contribution in the base image input, but this does reflect the creative process of staging and iteration, and yields a dangerous implication that application of AI tools to any preexisting human work-in-progress will render the modified work a new 'derivative work' that is unregistrable. Characterizing actual expressive decisions in the creative process as mere 'ideas' conflates indicators of originality with the scope of copyright protection, causing the originality analysis to collapse onto itself, as any creative decision taken in isolation is just an idea."
Read the full article here.
