A legal report about the film and television industry, issued by the Beijing Film Law Firm, was shared without authorization on a subscription account named “Golden Hand” on a Baidu platform. The law firm sued, claiming its copyright was infringed, however the defendant argued that the report was "written" by a legal statistics analysis software, meaning it is not original and thus not protected by law.
The Shenzhen Special Zone Daily said that the law firm does own the copyright to the report, as the AI (artificial intelligence) software could not have completed the report, as only people can have decided what information or data should be used and how to use it.
The report is also original. The law firm selected the data sources and search terms, standardized the statistical analysis criteria, checked them one by one, and then made a statistical analysis and wrote a concise and well-structured report. This creation process is complete, and should be protected by law.
Currently, it is too early to give legal recognition to AI as being a separate entity. The benefits and liabilities brought by AI are owned and undertaken by certain people. Even if the AI can write something, the copyright must be shared with the owners, because only people can decide what the machine writes, how to write it and whether the content meets requirements.
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