Copyright and the Artificially Intelligent Author
By Annemarie Bridy
For more than a quarter century, interest among copyright scholars in the question of AI authorship has waxed and waned as the popular conversation about AI has oscillated between exaggerated predictions for its future and premature pronouncements of its death. For policymakers, the issue has sat on the horizon, always within view but never actually pressing. To recognize this fact, however, is not to say that we can or should ignore the challenge that AI authorship presents to copyright law’s underlying assumptions about creativity. On the contrary, the relatively slow development of AI offers a reprieve from the reactive, crisis-driven model of policymaking that has dominated copyright law in the digital era.
By engaging and extending insights from two relatively discrete lines of existing scholarship—the postmodern critique of romantic authorship and the more pragmatic literature on copyright in works produced with the aid of computers—this Article seeks to answer the vexing copyright questions that attend the artificially intelligent production of cultural works. It does so by developing the argument that all creativity is inherently algorithmic and that works produced autonomously by computers are therefore less heterogeneous to both their human counterparts and existing copyright doctrine than appearances may at first suggest.
Posted in Articles.
Tagged with artificial intelligence, copyright.
March 29, 2012 – Cite: 2012 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 5
The Case of Non-Practicing Entities
By Stijepko Tokic
According to an often-cited study on the number of invalidated patents, nearly half of litigated patents were held invalid. Moreover, a new study published in March of 2011 has found that even the “most-litigated” patents, defined as patents that have been litigated eight or more times, fare very poorly in patent litigation. Perhaps not surprisingly, nearly 70% of merit-based losses in the most-litigated patent cases are due to findings of invalidity of the repeat plaintiffs’ patents. This data is particularly interesting in light of the current debate about non-practicing entities (NPEs) that simply hold patents they do not practice, because almost two-thirds of these most-litigated patents are owned by NPEs. Given that NPEs, even those that own heavily litigated patents, very rarely prevail in trial on the merits, but almost nine out of ten lawsuits involving NPEs end up in settlement, one must question whether a number of these settlements might be based on invalid patents. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
Tagged with intellectual property, npes, patent trolls, patents.
January 9, 2012 – Cite: 2012 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 2
By Tom Ewing & Robin Feldman
The patent world is quietly undergoing a change of seismic proportions. In a few short years, a handful of entities have amassed vast treasuries of patents on an unprecedented scale. To give some sense of the magnitude of this change, our research shows that in a little more than five years, the most massive of these has accumulated 30,000-60,000 patents worldwide, which would make it the 5th largest patent portfolio of any domestic US company and the 15th largest of any company in the world. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
Tagged with intellectual property, npes, patent trolls, patents, trolls.
January 9, 2012 – Cite: 2012 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 1
Has the Commission Finally Gotten Too Big for Its Breaches?
By David Alan Zetoony
An online company provides products to individuals and small businesses. Like most online companies, it collects various types of information from its customers such as email addresses for notifications, mailing addresses for product shipment, and credit and debit card numbers for payment. Continued…
Posted in Articles.
December 27, 2011 – Cite: 2011 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 12
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