How Ip Struggles to Define AI-Generated Products and the Ownership Dilemma

Abstract

Intellectual Property (IP) rights have always had difficulties to cope with disruptive technologies. Development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and common use of it pushes the boundaries of copyright and patent protection. The interpretations of the patentability and copyrightability requirements for being protected by IP rights becomes ambiguous when assessing AI generated works, due to the ability of AI to learn and generate output without human intervention. This paper although there is no doubt that AI generates creative and inventive works which could obtain copyright and patent, existing framework of both IP rights in United States (US), United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) is clearly insufficient to deal with AI development. This paper addresses and analyses that the question of who will be the author/inventor or owner of the autonomous work and reaches the conclusion that it does not seem to be answered adequately on the basis of current regulations. The author of this dissertation argues that rather than accepting AI as an author or not, some legal regulations should be done to overcome the uncertainty of AI generated works’ protection scope. The Dabus decision has shown that there is no unity in terms of assessing inventions across these jurisdictions. Whilst AI develops over time, if the ambiguity problem of AI generated works is not solved, this may become troublesome to deal with in the future.