Dale Nelson and Victoria Rosales Pen Filmmaker Magazine Article on AI Copyright Restrictions
Dale Nelson and Victoria Rosales recently authored a piece in Filmmaker Magazine outlining the copyright guidelines and First Amendment principles that filmmakers should be aware of concerning the legalities of emerging artificial intelligence technologies.
Dale and Victoria outline the copyright laws regulating “human authorship” stemming from the 1884 Supreme Court case Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, in which the Court defined an “author” as “he to whom anything owns its origin; originator; maker; one who completes a work of science or literature.” This ruling ultimately led to the recent United States Copyright Office decision that AI-generated works are not copyrightable because they are not a product of “human authorship,” a precedent that has been upheld in several court rulings since.
However, Dale and Victoria explain that this decision does not necessarily mean that a film including certain elements generated by AI will not be eligible for copyright protection.
“Although the Copyright Office will not grant copyright protection to works generated solely by non-human authors, it will grant copyright protection to a human’s creative arrangement and selection of those works, or to elements of an overall work that was authored by a human,” they write.
Dale and Victoria add that so long as a filmmaker discloses their film’s AI-generated content, it can still be registered according to the Copyright Office’s guidelines, which exclude the AI-generated material from the registration similarly to the way pre-existing materials like photos, video footage, and music are excluded from new works.
“Put simply, while the advent of artificial intelligence in film and television is exciting, it is not so groundbreaking as to necessitate the creation of new legal principles,” Dale and Victoria conclude. “Legal concerns can be adequately addressed by pre-existing law that has successfully protected artists’ creations and First Amendment rights for hundreds of years.”