Humanist Copyright

This exploration of the role of authorship in copyright law proceeds in three parts: historical, doctrinal, and predictive. First, I will review the development of author-focused property rights in the pre-copyright regimes of printing privileges and in early Anglo-American copyright law through the 1909 U.S. Copyright Act. Second, I will analyze the extent to which the present U.S. copyright law does (and does not) honor human authorship. Finally, I will consider the potential responses of copyright law to the claims of proprietary rights in AI-generated outputs. I will explain why the humanist orientation of U.S. copyright law validates the position of the Copyright Office and the courts that the output of an AI system will not be a “work of authorship” unless human participation has determinatively caused the creation of the output.