Copyright is centred around original works by artists and authors. The people who come up with these works are, therefore, quite naturally a very important part of discussion whenever copyright laws are being talked about. The technological progress of the twentieth century has left a lot for the law-makers to discuss. With artificial intelligence getting equipped with abilities to learn by itself and, what is more, important to our discussion, the ability to create by itself, is something to think about when it comes to copyright laws. The most obvious question to start the discussion would be: who would get the credit for an artistic creation if it was created by artificial intelligence? Will it be the person who worked on the algorithm or would it be free to use by anyone? If the algorithm can learn patterns and rhythms on its own, to what extent would/should the laws recognize this autonomy?

It is worth noting at the start of this discussion which would be surrounded authorship, that there are three important international treaties which are significant to the interpretation and development of copyright law: WIPO, the Berne Convention and the TRIPS Agreement. The Berne Convention has mentioned the term ‘author’ in its treaty but looking for something more than that is futile as it is not defined there. It is quite obvious to observe that since most of these international instruments came into place before the present form of artificial intelligence came into existence, they hardly mention anything about non-human authorship. The most common and essential features to ascertain the originality of an artistic/literary work are: ‘the requirement for the author to be a human being and there should be an intellectual contribution which can be valued more than a mere ‘exchange of value’. The Berne Convention instead of defining the term ‘author’, establishes a rule which aims to provide a certain level of certainty and decrease the burden of proof for the right holders. It specifies a concept of the author by stating that if the name of the author is indicated, the author would be regarded as the author of that piece of work. It can be contended that the author then can be a natural or legal person.

Under European Union laws, the recognition of artificial intelligence’s authorship is also doubted. Cinematography and audio-visual works are excluded from this doubt. Computer programs and databases cannot be utilized to address the issue of non-human authorship. Article 1 clause 5 of Directive 93/83 explains that for cinematographic or audio-visual works, the main director can be labelled as the author, leaving the consideration of others as co-authors up to the discretion of its Member-States. None of the world’s copyright laws shows adequacy in handling the idea of non-human authors as it was exposed in the famous ‘Monkey-Selfie’ incident. This incident brought to the fore the structure of the current laws which do not recognize any sort of non-human authorship. Even computer-generated work is subject to the same principle as it would be hailed as a work by a non-legal person. In the famous case ‘Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery’, the court held that a chimpanzee could not be recognized as a person with rights under the habeas corpus as animals could not be expected to bear legal duties or any sort of societal or legal responsibilities.