Artificial intelligence is an advanced technological tool that has begun to gain momentum around the world in recent years and affects the entire world as well as intellectual property laws. The main challenges in this field arise from the fact that the intellectual product that must be protected was created by a machine and not by a person.
Artificial intelligence – what is it?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) or in Hebrew – artificial intelligence, is a system with the ability to choose independently that imitates a human thinking mechanism when the result is not dictated in advance by a person. A common artificial intelligence technology is used on the Internet in bots, characters that scan the Internet and copy information according to the user’s request. In addition, Deep Fake technology makes it possible to create the illusion that familiar and unfamiliar characters are participating in synthetic videos. The field of deep learning allows the machine to teach itself how to perfect its activity based on data and image analysis without human intervention in contrast to the field of machine learning in which the programmer feeds data into the system to teach it how to refine its activity.
The technologies most relevant to our case concern artificial intelligence technologies that produce works protected by copyright law such as: literary, artistic, musical, dramatic and architectural works. Thus, there are programs that produce songs independently or that produce unique drawings randomly or based on data entered by the user. For example, the DALL-E software turns any text entered by the user into a realistic image. Another relevant field concerns artificial intelligence that produces patentable inventions.
The owner by right of creators or inventor of the patent
According to Article 33 of the Copyright Law, the first owner of a work is the creator. There are several exceptions to this rule, for example in relation to cases where the employee in an employee-employer relationship is the creator (section 34 of the law) and cases where the work was created or commissioned by the state (section 36 of the law).
According to the patent laws, the inventor of the invention is the one who made a real contribution, qualitatively and not quantitatively, to the creation of the invention. That is, whoever thought of the invention and came up with the idea behind it. In general, according to Section 1 of the Patent Law, the inventor of the invention (or his attorney) is the first owner of the patent unless otherwise decided in the agreement.
Ownership of works or inventions created by artificial intelligence
In contrast to the classic cases mentioned above, when the creator/inventor is an artificial intelligence, there is no external intervention in the product, therefore the question arises as to who will be given the ownership, and as a result the rights to the creation/invention.
You can think of several possible alternatives regarding potential owners of the creation/invention:
Defining the author of the software as the owner – although this makes sense to encourage the writing of AI software, there is a difficulty in that the origin of the creation/invention is not in the programmer but in the software and the only work that originates directly from the programmer is the AI software itself (constitutes a literary work). Therefore, in relation to copyright there is a conflict with the condition of originality that appears in Section 4 of the Copyright Law as a condition for the law’s applicability to the work. Even in patent law a difficulty arises since it seems that the software is the one who conceived the idea at the base of the invention and not the programmer.
The definition of artificial intelligence as an owner – artificial intelligence can be recognized as having a separate legal personality that can receive rights and bear obligations similar to corporations that constitute an artificial body with a separate legal personality. This option goes against the basic concept in the literature regarding copyright as one that must be owned by a person. Recognizing artificial intelligence as having mental and creative abilities similar to humans and even more sophisticated than those of humans challenges this concept and in doing so may negate the justification for granting the right in the first place.
Denying the applicability of copyright laws/patent laws – one of the basic justifications for intellectual property laws is the desire to encourage people to create. When the sole creator/inventor is the machine and she does not require any incentive to produce additional works/inventions, there is apparently no justification for granting her the right of ownership. In addition, there is no justification to grant ownership to the programmer since the source of the work is not in him and he is not the factor with the significant contribution to the formation of the invention. Therefore there is no factor that is suitable to be the owner.
The ruling in the world regarding artificial intelligence
Due to the accelerated technological development and the difficulty of the law to catch up, there is currently a lack of binding rulings on the subject. The first Australian judgment of its kind in the field deals with the question of whether the artificial intelligence “DABUS” (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) can be registered as an inventor. The machine consists of neural networks that transmit visual, linguistic and auditory information between them, which together produces unique and complex ideas that eventually become patentable inventions. The Federal Court in Australia determined that as long as there is no provision in the Australian patent law that excludes the possibility of artificial intelligence being the inventor of a patent, the artificial intelligence can be recognized as an inventor, in accordance with option number 2 above.
Professional support for the protection of copyright or invention
Especially in an advanced and relatively new technological field such as the protection of artificial intelligence products, close legal advice is of particular importance both to create protection for the products from the beginning and to deal with attempts to infringe and appropriate the products. As a leading firm of lawyers and patent attorneys in the field of intellectual property, our firm has over 30 years of experience in representing over 8,000 clients and great expertise in the protection of copyrights and patents. The office has a professional team of intellectual property lawyers who provide legal advice to creators and inventors both in registering the rights and in legal protection of them in case of infringement.
The said in this article and in general on the website should not be considered as legal advice and the things written in it should not be considered as a substitute for individual legal advice but only a personal opinion and/or a general explanation. Of course, you should not rely on and/or act in accordance with the above without individual legal advice from an attorney
*The aforementioned in this article and on the website in general should not be considered as legal advice and the things written in it should not be considered as a substitute for individual legal advice, but a personal opinion and/or a general explanation only. Of course, you should not rely on and/or act in accordance with the above without individual legal advice from an attorney
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