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Legally speaking

AI Authorship?

By Pamela Samuelson
Communications of the ACM, July 2020, Vol. 63 No. 7, Pages 20-22
10.1145/3401718
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two robotic hands drawing each other — Credit: Getty Images

Since the mid-1960s, intellectual property (IP) law specialists have debated whether computers or computer programs can be "authors" whose outputs can be copyrighted.⁶ The U.S. Congress was so befuddled about this issue in the mid-1970s that it created a special Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) to address this and a few other computer-related issues.⁴

A second burst of interest in AI authorship broke out in the mid-1980s. Congress once again commissioned a study, this time from its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), to address this and other controversial computer-related issues. OTA did not offer an answer to the question, perhaps in part because at that time, it was a "toy problem" because no commercially significant outputs of AI or other software programs had yet been generated.⁵

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