Digital Intelligence Prospect Reporter Li Hainan.
A few days ago, the "First Case of Copyright Infringement of AI Generation**" completed the judgment - the Beijing Internet Court made a first-instance judgment on the copyright infringement dispute of artificial intelligence generation ** (AI painting**), and found that the artificial intelligence generated ** (AI painting**) involved in the case has the element of "originality", which reflects the original intellectual investment of human beings, and should be recognized as a work and protected by the Copyright Law.
The reason is that the plaintiff Li used AI to generate the ** involved in the case and then published it on the Xiaohongshu platform;The defendant is a blogger with a hundred accounts, and the article with pictures used the ** generated by the plaintiff's AI, and the plaintiff sued. From the filing of the case to the judgment, this case is very characteristic of the "AI era", highlighting the calm applicability of compliance laws in the field of AI commercialization under the "sweeping" of the AI trend.
Confirmation of rights is an important foundation for getting involved in AI intellectual property protection.
In daily litigation cases involving intellectual property rights such as copyrights, trademark rights, and patent rights, the first thing to prove is that a certain work has the corresponding rights in accordance with relevant laws and regulations, which is the premise of safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of the subject of the litigation. Song Tiancheng is a litigation lawyer at a law firm in Beijing, specializing in economic litigation cases. Regarding the dazzling plagiarism of various types of works on the Internet, he provided a way for the reporter of China Economic Times to seek intellectual property protection in the AI era based on his professional experience.
Affirmation of rights may be the beginning of allowing all innovative behaviors to be legal and compliant.
All kinds of new things in the process of economic and social development have gone through the process of being born out of nowhere to being recognized by the market, and then realizing the confirmation and protection of rights in the legal sense, and thus the protection of property rights and the distribution of economic benefits. From audio-visual works such as television, film, and **, to digital publication copyrights, etc., without exception.
There have always been pros and cons over whether the ** work generated by AI technology constitutes an infringement of the existing work, and whether the ** content generated by it has independent copyright.
The positive view is that for AI-generated audio-visual works, from the perspective of promoting and maintaining innovation, as long as the creator is still a human being, the rights and interests of the creator should be protected to prevent possible misappropriation and abuse.
The opposing view is that there are certain legal and technical difficulties in confirming the copyright and intellectual property rights of AI-generated ** works. For example, how to determine whether an AI-generated work is original, and how to define the responsibilities and rights and interests of creators and AI technology providers. At the same time, it has also been pointed out that the confirmation of rights in this part will inevitably invest more manpower, material and financial resources for copyright protection and management, which will increase the cost and burden.
However, judging from the "first case" of this judgment, the direction of future legal compliance and release is becoming clearer.
In Song Tiancheng's view, although China is not a case law country, it has the guiding cases of the Supreme People's Court as a reference. The "First Case" clearly illustrates the original intention of the law to safeguard innovation, releases sufficient tolerance, and maintains an important foundation for legal protection through the confirmation of rights.
Of course, in the future, we will continue to further standardize the legal provisions and refine the application of the law according to the technology and market commercial behavior.
Li Shunde, a professor at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, stressed in an interview with a reporter from the China Economic Times that the property rights system is the cornerstone of the socialist market economy. In the context of economic globalization, the rapid development of a new generation of network technology, digital technology and information technology represented by AI technology has also put forward requirements for international protection and cooperation in the protection of intellectual property rights. ”
It is time to maintain the legal environment for AI innovation.
Looking back on the past, various types of new things that have emerged in the process of economic and social development often need to go through a series of stages of development in order to be widely recognized and protected.
However, when the giant wheel of the times shifts to the AI era, related technologies have brought a lot of challenges to the intellectual property protection system built in the past. Any work that has been created in the past may take many years to create and then be recognized by the market, leaving enough room for follow-up on the application of the law. The rapid development of AI technology has made the generation time of works extremely compressed, even within a few seconds, and the application of the law has been slightly stretched for a while.
Chen Shaofeng, vice president of the China Cultural Industry Promotion Association and president of the Metaverse Cultural Industry Branch, told the China Economic Times that since the beginning of this year, the integration and application of AI technology and the metaverse has continued to occupy the top hot spots, and it has given all fields and industries the opportunity to share the opportunity of AI and the metaverse to collide. Taking generative AI applications as an example, from the beginning of the year to the current momentum that has swept the world, countries around the world are experiencing the impact of new technologies in property rights protection and law application.
In Chen Shaofeng's view, different from the legal norms surrounding the digital economy in recent years, the impact of AI technology applications on the whole industry, especially on the cultural industry, has made it increasingly urgent to do a good job in intellectual property protection in the AI era. "The digital economy revolves around digital property rights transactions, which also makes the corresponding rights and responsibilities more and more important. Chen Shaofeng said that at present, in response to the content recommendation generated by AI technology after the relabeling and reorganization of data content, the platform should make good use of algorithms to avoid recommending bad information, and at the same time, so that the digital property rights accumulated on the digital economy platform can be benignly protected, it is necessary to plan norms and legislation in the long run, and solve the problem of digital property rights protection and conflict of interest in both the symptoms and the root causes.
Once the boundaries of property rights are clarified, digital property rights management will be easily solved, and it will burst out with amazing power. Chen Shaofeng believes that with the continuous iterative progress of AI technology, the future will also face the ownership of real people, digital people, virtual people, the ownership of the copyright of works created by digital people, how to confirm the rights of the economic benefits generated by them, and whether robots need to pay income tax, "These all depend on improving laws and regulations as soon as possible to ensure the protection of digital property rights and escort the long-term development of the digital economy." ”
Gong Caichun, director of the Metaverse Expert Committee of the Beijing Information Industry Association and president of the Wuhan Metaverse Research Institute, also told the China Economic Times that with the advancement of science and technology, the metaverse and AI generative applications continue to create massive digital content in a short period of time. environmental and other challenges to achieve a balance between scientific and effective supervision and innovative development.