COPYRIGHT'S TRYST WITH GENERATIVE AI

In the past, copyright law dealt with copies of the original works; now, it has to deal with training of copyrighted material by AI platforms and not with the reproduction of copies itself.

- 

Copyright law has always been a product of technology. It was created in 1710 to deal with the outcome of the invention of the printing press, to protect publishers against any unauthorised publication while encouraging learning, and to further their economic interests.

Since inception, copyright law has adapted itself to various technologies from the time of the printing press to the photocopying machine, to the recording device, and to the Internet. In each stage, the law has worked its way around technology. However, today there is a belief that generative AI has the potential to upset the copyright law. Such a debate is not new: it surfaces roughly every 20 years with each technological advent. So far, copyright law has been successful in forbidding commercial reproduction of works protected by copyright; currently, the law faces the task of prohibiting AI platforms from training on the works of the creators. There is a shift in the approach of using copyright law. In the past, the law dealt with copies of the original works; now, it has to deal with training of copyrighted material by AI platforms and not with the reproduction of copies itself.

At a crossroads

Generative AI companies, specifically Open AI, have found themselves at a crossroads with copyright law across countries. AI platforms employ a technology called Internet scraping by which Large Language Models (LLM) train the platform on all available knowledge. For training purposes, the platform accesses both copyrighted and non-copyrighted content. The copyright infringement cases are fought on subject matters such as literature, music, and photographs.