The Machine as Author

Machines are increasingly good at emulating humans and laying siege to what has been a strictly human outpost: intellectual creativity. At this juncture, we cannot know with certainty how high machines will reach on the creativity ladder when compared to, or measured against, their human counterparts, but we do know this. They are far enough already to force us to ask a genuinely hard and complex question, one that intellectual property (“IP”) scholars and courts will need to answer soon; namely, whether copyrights should be granted to productions made not by humans but by machines. This Article’s specific objective is to answer the question of whether autonomously created AI machine productions in the literary and artistic field (that is, prima facie copyrightable subject matter) should be protected by copyright