AUTHORS and MACHINES Jane C

AUTHORS AND MACHINES Jane C. Ginsburg† & Luke Ali Budiardjo†† ABSTRACT Machines, by providing the means of mass production of works of authorship, engendered copyright law. Throughout history, the emergence of new technologies tested the concept of authorship, and courts in response endeavored to clarify copyright’s foundational principles. Today, developments in computer science have created a new form of machine, the “artificially intelligent” (AI) system apparently endowed with “computational creativity.” AI systems introduce challenging variations on the perennial question of what makes one an “author” in copyright law: Is the creator of a generative program automatically the author of the works her process begets, even if she cannot anticipate the contents of those works? Does the user of the program become the (or an) author of an output whose content the user has at least in part defined? This Article frames these and similar questions that generative machines provoke as an opportunity to revisit the concept of copyright authorship in general and to illuminate its murkier corners. This Article examines several fundamental relationships (between author and amanuensis, between author and tool, and between author and co-author) as well as several authorship anomalies (including the problem of “accidental” or “indeterminate” authorship) to unearth the basic principles and latent ambiguities which have nourished debates over the meaning of the “author” in copyright. This Article presents an overarching and internally consistent model of authorship based on two basic pillars: a mental step (the conception of a work) and a physical step (the execution of a work), and defines the contours of these basic pillars to arrive at a cohesive definition of authorship. The Article then applies the conception-and-execution theory of authorship to reach a series of conclusions about the question of machine “authorship.” Even the most technologically advanced machines of our era are little more than faithful agents of the humans who design or use them. Asking whether a computer can be an author therefore is the “wrong” question; the “right” question addresses how to evaluate the authorial claims of the humans involved in either preparing or using the machines that “create.” In many cases, either the upstream human being who programs and trains a machine to produce an output, or the downstream human being who requests the output, is sufficiently involved in the conception and execution of the resulting work to claim authorship. But in some instances, the contributions of the human designer and user will be too attenuated from the work’s creation for either to qualify as “authors”—leaving the work “authorless.” DOI: https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38SF2MC24 © 2019 Jane C. Ginsburg & Luke Ali Budiardjo. † Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia Law School. †† Columbia Law School JD Class of 2018. Many thanks to the members of the Columbia Law School faculty workshop; Ben Bogart, PhD; Madeline Rose Finkel; Rebecca Giblin and François Petitjean; Jeremy Kessler; Catherine Kessedjian; Ed Klaris; Enoch Liang and James Lee; Samuel Pitkin Niles; Javed Qadrud-Din; Blake Reese; and Jeffrey Stein. 344 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 34:343 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 345 II. BEFORE AI—CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY MECHANICAL AND NATURAL FORCES ..................................... 352 A. THE CONJOINED COMPONENTS OF AUTHORSHIP: DETAILED CONCEPTION + CONTROLLED EXECUTION ......................................... 354 B. AUTHORS AND AMANUENSES: THE PRINCIPAL-AGENT RELATIONSHIP ............................................................................................. 358 C. WHEN RANDOM FORCES, FAUNAL OR METEOROLOGICAL, INTERVENE IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS ................................................ 361 D. THE LIMITS OF THE AUTHOR’S “CONCEPTION” .................................. 366 1. Curing Deficiencies in Conception: The “Adoption” Theory of Authorship ............................................................................................ 366 2. Conception via Process ........................................................................... 370 E. ALLOCATING AUTHORSHIP BETWEEN UPSTREAM AND DOWNSTREAM AUTHORS .......................................................................... 374 F. SHARING AUTHORSHIP: JOINT WORKS ................................................... 378 1. Categories of Joint Works and Modes of Co-Authorship ........................ 378 2. Contemporaneous “Intent to Merge” and Unacquainted Co- Authors ................................................................................................ 381 3. Why Congress Required Contemporaneous Intent to Merge Contributions ........................................................................................ 383 a) Merger of Inseparable Contributions Without Collaboration?........................................................................387 b) The Implications of Collaboration Between Co- Authors……………………………………………….389 III. AUTHORSHIP OF COMPUTER-ENABLED OUTPUTS .............. 392 A. THE PROBLEM(?) OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ................................ 393 1. The Wrong Question: Machine “Authorship” ....................................... 393 2. Machine Learning and the “Black Box” Problem ................................. 401 B. THE RIGHT QUESTION: SEARCHING FOR THE HUMAN AUTHOR ........................................................................................................ 404 1. “Ordinary” Tools: Those Whose Outputs Reflect the Creative Contributions of Their Users ................................................................. 405 2. Fully-Generative Machines: Those Whose Outputs Reflect the Creative Contributions of Their Designers .............................................. 407 3. Partially-Generative Machines: Those Whose Outputs Reflect a Combination of the Creative Contributions of Designer and User ........... 413 C. AUTHORSHIP AND PARTIALLY-GENERATIVE MACHINES .................. 417 2019] AUTHORS AND MACHINES 345 1. Distinguishing Between Fully- and Partially-Generative Machines: Can the Upstream Creator Claim Ownership of All Resulting Outputs? ............................................................................................... 417 a) Describing the Distinction..... …………………………417 b) Prior Judicial Approaches to This Question…………..419 c) Approaches to the Distinction Between Fully and Partially Generative Machines………………………....422 2. Dealing with Partially-Generative Machines: Who Executes the Work? .................................................................................................. 426 IV. THE AUTHORLESS OUTPUT ........................................................ 433 A. WHAT COMPUTER-ENABLED WORKS ARE “AUTHORLESS”? ............. 433 B. REEXAMINING AUTHORSHIP DOCTRINE TO AVOID THE CLASSIFICATION OF MACHINE-ENABLED OUTPUTS AS “AUTHORLESS” ............................................................................................ 437 1. Joint Authorship ................................................................................... 440 2. Sole Authorship .................................................................................... 443 V. CONCLUSION: IF NOT COPYRIGHT, THEN WHAT? ............... 445 I. INTRODUCTION Machines, by providing the means of mass reproduction of works of authorship, engendered copyright law.1 Later, cameras—machines employed to create works, rather than merely to reproduce them—called into question copyright’s coverage of works whose human authorship those machines purportedly usurped.2 The digital era exacerbates the anxiety of authorship, as “artificial intelligence” supposedly supplants human artists, writers, and composers in generating visual, literary, and musical outputs indistinguishable 1. See, e.g., Brad A. Greenberg, Rethinking Technological Neutrality, 100 MINN. L. REV. 1495, 1502 (2016) (“Modern copyright law’s existence can be traced to a transcendent technology: the movable-type printing press.”); Paul Edward Geller, Copyright History and the Future: What’s Culture Got To Do With It?, 47 J. COPYRIGHT SOC’Y 209, 215–19 (2000) (tracing history of copyright law beginning with the introduction of the printing press in 15th century Europe). 2. See infra Section II.A (discussing the debate about copyright in photographic works); see also Christine Haight Farley, The Lingering Effects of Copyright’s Response to the Invention of Photography, 65 U. PITT. L. REV. 385, 388 (2004) (noting that photography was the “first technological challenge” for copyright law). 346 BERKELEY TECHNOLOGY LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 34:343 from human-produced endeavors.3 Other commentators have posited adapting copyright law to the challenges of machine authorship;4 we ask the predicate questions: What is authorship in copyright law, and how do its precepts apply to machine-enabled outputs? In addressing the first question, and in keeping with the 1976 Copyright Act’s general norm of technological neutrality,5 we derive general principles of authorship from copyright cases arising in the analog world in order to apply them to emerging modes of machine-implicated creativity. Only after ascertaining whether computer- enabled outputs are works of authorship according to underlying principles of copyright law can one determine whether, for authorless outputs, copyright law provides the

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