Sarit Mizrahi
Kate Darling will lead a discussion of Sarit Mizrahi‘s Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Is Copyright Protection Justified for Robotic Faux-Originality? on Saturday, April 13, at 4:00 p.m. at #werobot 2019.
The twenty-first century is credited with machines that can generate anything from poems to novels, as well as musical compositions and works of art – all with a certain level of proficiency that would have any human doubting that it was created by a machine. This reality has led several scholars to posit that machine-generated content ought to be entitled to copyright protection because it ostensibly satisfies copyright’s low originality threshold. Very few, however, have seriously contemplated whether these imitations of authorship are the types of works that copyright even ought to promote.
Kate Darling
While not denying that machine-generated content might appear original, this article questions whether it would be justified for copyright to endorse this form of creativity. This is because originality is merely a single element necessary to extend protection to a given work, but it is not the purpose for creating and receiving copyright protection. The purpose of copyright is to promote the orderly exchange of ideas and encourage the pursuit of knowledge in an effort to advance social efficiency. Knowledge is created through intellectual labour and is exchanged through social dialogue, and it is this social dialogue that serves to further social efficiency.
This article demonstrates, however, that machine-generated content is inherently incapable of pursuing these goals that are so fundamental to copyright’s purpose. It begins by unearthing the social dialogue that sits at the core of authorship and elucidating why robots can neither participate in nor advance this discourse. This article then proceeds to expose the acute difference between robotic productions and rule-based creations by humans. It essentially demonstrates how the former is unable to advance – and even risks hindering – the social dialogue underlying copyright, while the latter is still capable of doing so, even though they are both employing seemingly random processes to create works. By illustrating how the denial of copyright protection for machine-generated content is unlikely to thwart advances in this arena, this article concludes by offering support for the inclusion of this content in the public domain.
