Talkin' 'Bout AI Generation: Copyright and the Generative-AI Supply Chain
Katherine Lee, A. Feder Cooper, James Grimmelmann

TL;DR
This paper introduces the generative-AI supply chain to analyze copyright issues across diverse AI systems, highlighting decision points affecting legal responsibility and the impact of technical design choices.
Contribution
It develops a framework called the generative-AI supply chain to systematically analyze copyright implications in AI systems and their interconnected stages.
Findings
Identifies key decision points affecting copyright liability.
Highlights how upstream technical choices influence downstream legal issues.
Provides a structured approach for courts to evaluate AI copyright cases.
Abstract
"Does generative AI infringe copyright?" is an urgent question. It is also a difficult question, for two reasons. First, "generative AI" is not just one product from one company. It is a catch-all name for a massive ecosystem of loosely related technologies, including conversational text chatbots like ChatGPT, image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E, coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, and systems that compose music and create videos. These systems behave differently and raise different legal issues. The second problem is that copyright law is notoriously complicated, and generative-AI systems manage to touch on a great many corners of it: authorship, similarity, direct and indirect liability, fair use, and licensing, among much else. These issues cannot be analyzed in isolation, because there are connections everywhere. In this Article, we aim to bring order to the chaos. To…
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Taxonomy
TopicsLaw, AI, and Intellectual Property · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Digital Transformation in Law
