Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Copyright

AI technologies and generative AI models enabling the creation of original content by processing text, images, sound and other data have been a hot topic of this year. Should the outputs generated by AI be copyrighted work, if so who owns the rights, and copyright infringement by use of AI have been widely discussed.

The general rule appears to be that an AI cannot have rights to the works it generates and that only human creativity can enjoy copyright protection. In the "Zarya of the Dawn" decision¹ of United States Copyright Office, a comic book featuring AI-generated cartoons was granted copyright protection only in terms of the text and arrangement of the images created by the author but the drawings generated directly by AI are excluded from the scope of registration. On the other hand, in the "Li v. Liu" decision the Chinese Court, on November 27, 2023 determined that the plaintiff holds copyright to the images that it created by using AI.² The Court assessed