Extract from John “Jack” Griem and Robert Lands’ article “Copyright Infringement by Generative AI Tools Under US and UK Law: Common Threads and Contrasting Approaches”
Generative artificial intelligence is transforming the way we do business, make art, and learn new information. Every day, another company launches or updates a product or service that integrates generative AI. Many of these products and services are available on the internet, available in many countries at once.
Intellectual property law is famously country-specific. Each country has developed its copyright law over many years, through a mixture of statutory provisions and decisional case law. At the same time, most countries are now members of the Berne Convention, which enables enforcement of the copyright in a work created in one Berne signatory country to be enforced in any other signatory country. The law governing enforcement of copyright, however, remains country-specific.
Two countries at the heart of the development of generative AI are the United Kingdom and the United States. Many copyright infringement actions have been filed in both countries by owners of copyrights in works used to train generative AI models, against companies that developed and released AI tools.
