U.S. Copyright Office Extends Deadline for Comments on Artificial Intelligence Notice of Inquiry

 From the U.S. Copyright Office:

The U.S. Copyright Office extended the deadline to submit comments in response to its August 30, 2023, notice of inquiry regarding artificial intelligence and copyright. The new deadlines will ensure that members of the public have sufficient time to prepare fulsome responses to the Office's questions so the Office can proceed with its inquiry with the benefit of a complete record of public input and feedback.

Initial written comments are now due by 11:59 p.m. eastern time on Monday, October 30, 2023. Reply comments are now due by 11:59 p.m. eastern time on Wednesday, November 29, 2023.

The Federal Register notice announcing this extension and additional information, including instructions for submitting comments, are available at https://www.copyright.gov/policy/artificial-intelligence/. 

The Copyright Office webpage entitled "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence" contains a lot of useful information and I encourage you to look at it.  One of the resources on that page is "Artificial Intelligence: The Copyright Connection" from 2021. I think the questions asked by Steve Andreadis are still at the center of this discussion:

• How are artists, scientists, and businesses inspired by the technological advances of AI? 
• When AI produces a creative work, is the expression owned by human or machine? 
• What is owed to creators of AI input data from a copyright or moral rights perspective? 
• What ethical implications are involved in selecting a data set and building an AI system?

If you have thoughts on these and other questions regarding AI and copyright, consider submitting them to the Copyright Office.

Article: Generative AI is Disruptive, But More Copyright Isn’t the Answer

This article appeared in a recent Public Knowledge email and it seems appropriate to post because of the ongoing questions about generative AI (GAI). The article covers:

1. The training data
2. The training process
3. User inputs

I'm sure the last section on "Expanding Copyright Law Won’t Protect Artists from GAI’s Disruption" will attract your attention.

Copyright and artificial intelligence is worth keeping an eye on, but when you do that recognize that the law isn't going to suddenly change. As I said to someone on Friday, the law changes slowly. It also changes purposefully. Right now, we all still studying what AI means to creators and how the law can help (or hurt) the situation.

Article: A Book Is a Book Is a Book—Except When It’s an e-Book

Likely you have been reading about the Hachette v. Internet Archive litigation. This is an article that you might want to add to your reference list on the topic. This article by Maria Bustillos starts with an analogy:

Buying a book should be no different from buying an apple. When you buy an apple, the farmer can’t show up in your kitchen later and decide your time is up, and you’ve got to pay for it again. It’s yours forever—to eat, or paint in a still life, or cut up for a kid’s snack. And thanks to the first sale doctrine of copyright law, codified by Congress in 1909, the books on your shelves are yours forever, too, in exactly the same way your apple is; you’re free to read them (or not), loan them to friends, or sell them to a used bookshop, without restriction. Copyright law balances the public good—our collective right to access information—with the rights it grants to authors and inventors.

Are you intrigued? You can read the entire article on The Nation website.