The U.S. Copyright Office continues to allow the registrations of works with some AI-generated elements excluded. Today, we canvassed the Copyright Office’s treatment of computer programs.
Just last November, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that 25% of the company’s new code in its its programs is written by AI. That percentage is only likely to grow across the entire tech sector. Indeed, human computer programmers will become obsolete, according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang.
Against that tectonic shift, it’s no surprise the U.S. Copyright Office is allowing computer programs to be registered as copyrightable works, provided the AI-generated source code is excluded.
Adobe and IBM are two notable tech companies that have successfully registered AI-generated programs.
Here are the computer programs that U.S. Copyright Office has registered:
- Chatbot (Foodservice Chatbot): computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence.
- DPG (Foodservice Digital Product Guide) :Version 1.0.5: computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence.
- Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing: computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence (GitHub Copilot).
- Adobe Product Analytics 2024: computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence (Github Copilot).
- Adobe Journey Optimizer B2B Edition 2024: computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence (Github Copilot).
- Fire Spotter: new and revised computer program authorship by author. Material Excluded: computer program authorship generated by artificial intelligence.
- Computer program TruckSpace.AI: computer program. Material Excluded: some code generated by artificial intelligence.
- JOYAJOY Text to AI Memory Games and AI Gamification and AI Chess and AI Chess Gamification and Gamified Social Media: computer program. Material Excluded: computer program generated by artificial intelligence.
- CliniQuery: computer program. Material Excluded: source code generated by artificial intelligence.
- IBM watsonx Code Assistant (and Enterprise Java Applications) (extensions for VSCode and Eclipse) v. 1.0: computer program. Material Excluded: computer program, Previous Version and Material by Other Companies; source code generated by artificial intelligence.
What’s the basis for authorship?
Presumably, these computer programs consist of (i) some human-written code or, at the very least, (ii) some original selection, coordination, and arrangement of various lines of AI-generated code into the final computer program. Although the registrations do not indicate which, I infer these components must be the basis of human authorship, given the U.S. Copyright Office’s position on AI-generated works.
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