Information
Technology
Law in the
Global Society
Juridiskā fakultāte
Latvijas Universitāte
17 March 2020
Supplemental Video
Shawn N. Sullivan
Computer Generated
Works
(pages 270-72 of
textbook)
Artificial
Intelligence
• Machines that mimic cognitive
functions that humans associate
with the human mind, such as
learning and problem solving.
Policy
Questions
“[S]hould copyright only reward acts of truly
human cognition or does it play a more
utilitarian role in society, encouraging the
production and distribution of new works
irrespective of the manner in which they
were created?”
Toby Bond and Sarah Blair, Artificial
Intelligence & copyright: Section 9(3) or
authorship without an author, Journal of
Intellectual Property Law & Practice, 2019,
Vol. 14, No. 6/
U.S. Law: Traditional Requirement
of a Human Author as Prerequisite for Copyright
• Traditionally, for copyright to exist in a work, the work must
have an identifiable human author.
• Two Indonesian monkeys took “selfie” photos with a camera
that a photographer had rigged for that purpose. The
photographer claimed he was the author of the photo because
he had set up the photo shoot. Wikipedia contended that
because the human photographer hadn’t taken the shot, and
because non-human animals cannot be “authors” under U.S.
copyright law, the photo was in the public domain.
• The U.S. Copyright Office’s Compendium on Copyright
Practices affirms that, “To qualify as a work of ‘authorship’ a
work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles
Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this
requirement are not copyrightable.”
UK Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988
• Section 178 makes allowances for
“computer-generated,” defined as
works “generated by computer in
circumstances such that there is
no human author of the work.”
• Section 9(3) provides that the
author of a computer-generated
work is the person “by whom the
arrangements necessary for the
creation of the work are
undertaken.”
A Look at the Copyright Law
of the Republic of Latvia
This obviously cannot be detailed because the
instructor doesn’t read Latvian.
However, due to international & EU
harmonization of copyright law, modern
Obviously
detailedcontain
since the
instructor
copyrightnot
statutes
many
standard
doesn’t
read
Latvian.
elements.
Let’s review the exclusive rights of the
copyright holder and the exceptions to or
limitations on those rights.
Copyright Law of the Republic of Latvia
https://likumi.lv/ta/id/5138-autortiesibu-likums
https://likumi.lv/ta/en/en/id/5138
Chapter V of the Latvian Copyright Law Contains Limitations
on the Economic Rights of the Copyright Holder
Section 19 List of Uses of a Work Protected by Copyright that
Can be Done without Consent of the Copyright Holder