Module 3: Art(ificial) Ownership: Copyright & Law in the Age of AI

Atreya Mathur is the Director of Legal Research at the Center for Art Law. She received her Master of Laws from New York University School of Law where she specialized in Competition, Innovation, and Information Laws, with a focus on copyright, intellectual property, and art law. She is an attorney from India and also co-founded m e r a k i consultancy, a consultancy service focused on legal academia and higher education in law. At the Center she conducts legal research on an array of art and law related topics including copyright law, artificial intelligence and art, contracts, artists rights, estates and legal issues in contemporary and digital art. She publishes articles; conducts and teaches art & law workshops; addresses legal inquiries, contract reviews and conducts interviews with artists on general legal concerns. She has instructed several workshops and lectured on intellectual property, copyright, AI and contracts for attorneys, law students and artists at various universities, non-profits, art organizations and institutes including NYU Law, Harvard, Parsons School of Design, Fashion Institute of Technology, School of Visual Arts, and others. 

This session examined key legal and ethical issues related to AI-generated artworks, such as authorship, ownership, infringement, and fair use. It explored the perspectives of artists, tech companies, lawyers, and policymakers to understand how ethical collaboration with AI can align with best practices.

Authorship Concerns

• Who is the author of an AI-generated work?
• Who is the owner of the work? Who has rights over the work generated?
• Can AI generated work received any protection? Copyright or otherwise?

Training, Infringement and Fair Use-Legal and Ethical

• Issues of data scraping: Whose work is being used to train AI? Is this
infringement of pre-existing work? Is it transformative/fair use?
• If you find your work has been fed into AI– can you do anything about it?
Who is responsible?

• Creating in the “likeness” of an artist or generating content that looks like a
celebrity (right of publicity)
• Data privacy, data retention, training of AI..
• Racial bias in training

What next?

• What are we seeing-– copyright office, class action lawsuits, government–
data privacy, deep fakes, pornographic content-– what about copyright/IP?
• What are big AI/tech companies doing?
• What should we be concerned about? Legally AND ethically..
• What is the solution? Is there any?