RCLIP Evening Seminar: Authorship and Moral Rights in the Age of AI

Copyright law protects authors. Since the concept of authorship is fundamental to our modern understanding of copyright, any discussion of copyright and artificial intelligence must consider the implications of AI technology for authorship. The treatment of authorship under copyright law raises many questions in its own right. This talk will argue that the concept of authorship under copyright law is imperfectly developed and has become distorted over time, largely as a result of the influence of powerful stakeholders in the copyright industries. However, exploring authorship can lead to key insights for AI regulation. This talk focuses on a part of copyright that is rarely discussed in relation to AI, but is especially important from an authorship perspective: moral rights, which grant authors inalienable rights to be credited as creators of their works, and to protect their works. Moral rights can play a key role in regulating AI, and in shaping copyright law and policy effectively for the technological challenges that lie ahead. They should not be neglected by policymakers – in fact, they, should be a focus of copyright law reform at this key juncture for addressing the challenges raised by AI developments.