Can Nonhuman Author? Challenges for Anthropocentric Copyright Laws

• In Event: Personhood, Law, and Relationality Amidst the New Biosciences I

Abstract

Copyright law grants authorship and ownership to authors for their works of originality. Current copyright systems generally only permit a human person to author a work, arguing that only humans are capable of relevant intelligence and creativity. With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), computers are capable of learning and produce works on its own, demonstrating that creativity is not unique to human. (Boden, 2009) In fact, the originality requirement in copyright law is so low that can be easily sufficed by computers or animals (e.g. the “Monkey-selfie dispute that began in 2014). Why, then, do we limit authors in copyright law to natural persons, and treat both animals and computers simply as tools assisting human actors’ execution, even though human actors do not necessarily have full control over the final product, or even the ability to envision the actual outcome? Discussions about AI and copyright law tend to dismiss the possibility of nonhuman authors altogether, and the question quickly became only about incentivizing human actors and allocating property interests among them, i.e. whether the end users, programmers, or their employers (although ironically are often legal persons) deserve to claim authorship and/or ownership of the work.

This study discusses what differs animals and AI from a natural person in the process of producing new copyrightable works, and asks when, and to what extent can nonhuman claim ownership. The deeper philosophical question is the entanglements between human and nonhuman (Haraway, 2016), and whether nonhuman can be part of the human moral community.

Author

• Shun-Ling Chen, Institutum Iurisprudentiae, Academia Sinica