Annemarie Bridy

The Evolution of Authorship: Work Made by Code

This short article — a transcript of remarks from the Kernochan Center’s fall 2015 symposium, “Copyright Outside the Box” — considers whether U.S. copyright law requires human authorship as a precondition for protection of an artistic work. Tracing the surprisingly long history of copyright law’s grappling with the status of computer-generated works, I ask whether the increasing sophistication and independence of generative code should cause us to rethink embedded assumptions in the law about the meaning and origin of creativity and authorship. Because copyright law already accommodates non-human authors (i.e., corporations) through the work made for hire doctrine, I argue here (revisiting my 2012 article Coding Creativity) that recognition of AI authorship may be a less profound doctrinal leap than it may seem. Other countries already protect works generated autonomously by computers. In the United States, we can decide for policy reasons that machine-authored works should not be protected by copyright, but that choice is not inevitable given the current state of the law both here and abroad.

Copyright's Digital Deputies: DMCA-Plus Enforcement by Internet Intermediaries

In the years since passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”), the copyright industries have demanded that online intermediaries — both those covered by the DMCA and those falling outside the statute’s ambit — do more than the law requires to protect their intellectual property rights. In particular, they have sought new ways to reach and shutter “pirate sites” beyond the reach of United States law. Their demands have been answered through an expanding regime of nominally voluntary “DMCA-plus” enforcement. This chapter surveys the current landscape of DMCA-plus enforcement by dividing such enforcement into two categories: Type 1 and Type 2. Type 1 DMCA-plus enforcement is cooperation by DMCA-covered intermediaries over and above what is required for safe harbor. Type 2 DMCA-plus enforcement is cooperation by intermediaries whose activities fall outside the scope of the DMCA’s safe harbors and who are not liable for their customers’ copyright infringements under secondary liability rules. As the gap widens between what the law requires and what intermediaries are agreeing to do on a voluntary basis, there is reason to be concerned about the expressive and due process rights of users and website operators, who have no seat at the table when intermediaries and copyright owners negotiate “best practices” for mitigating online infringement, including which sanctions to impose, which content to remove, and which websites to block without judicial intervention.