Barry Scannell’s article on AI and copyright has been published by Oxford University Press in their prestigious Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice on 23rd July 2022.

This article considers the issue of AI authorship in the EU, identifies how this issue is problematic, and sets out to ascertain how much human involvement is required under EU law for a work to qualify for copyright protection. In discussing this issue, an analysis has been carried out on the literature on what constitutes an ‘AI-generated work’, due to the fact that there is a broad spectrum of what could be considered as such, with varying levels of human involvement.
 
An examination is undertaken of how certain EU Member States have approached authorship in their copyright legislation and carries out a doctrinal review of EU legislation and CJEU case law for the EU approach to authorship, identifying human authorship requirements.
 
A solution to the AI authorship question is proposed by suggesting that Irish legislation, which confers authorship of computer-generated works on the person who made the ‘necessary arrangements’ for the generation of those works, could be the basis of a model which EU Member States might follow, despite commentary suggesting that the Irish legislation is not compatible with the EU copyright acquis.
 
The full article is available here.