AI Enhancement and the Right of Integrity – Rehashing the 1980s Colorization Debate

With the rise and prominence of AI art and its profitability, it is clear that production companies and streaming platforms such as Netflix or Amazon Prime will look to ‘enhance’ works to which they own the rights, using those tools. While a plethora of works regarding AI in the IP space has been written recently when discussing authorship, and granting AI a legal personality, moral rights are often brushed over. Despite the novelty of AI tools, there is a long history of technological enhancements made on films with little legal resolution under Anglo-American legal systems. Therefore, this paper will, through a historical study of the colorization conflict in the US during the 1980s and its failure to provide directors with a satisfactory right, and through comparison with Continental European jurisdictions with a stronger moral rights tradition, seek to reform the right of integrity in light of this practice. However, it will also consider a balance between protecting directors from unnecessary AI enhancements to their films and the encouragement of the use of AI tools to efficiently restore films which would otherwise remain lost. This working paper is a part of the "Outstanding LLM Dissertations 2024".