AI Guides: Ownership of AI Generated Works

AI is already being used to create art, music, architectural floor plans and poetry. AI is being used to assist in the inventive process. Challenging questions arise around who owns the  intellectual property (IP) rights (like copyright or patent rights) in works and inventions created by AI. 

At present in Australia, there is no specific law dealing with ownership of IP in computer-generated works. What is clear based on the current law in Australia is that there will be no copyright protection without a human author. Similarly, to obtain a patent, a human inventor is needed. 

There is no general definition of “author” in the Australian Copyright Act. To take an example that interacts with AI technology, for a photograph, the author is defined as the person “who took the photograph”. This simply raises the question of who took the photograph.

• For example, who took a photograph from a camera on a drone, where one person controls the flight path of the drone (and the overall position of the camera), another person controls the camera via remote control, a third person selects a photograph from a burst of photos, and a fourth person runs the photo through a series of filters and photo editing software?
• Does it make any difference if the drone’s position and flight path is controlled by an auto-pilot computer program and the photograph’s colour palette and brightness is automatically corrected by the computer program in the camera? If a CCTV camera is fixed to a post and takes a photo every 30 seconds, is there a person taking that photo, and if so, who?