29
Nov
2024
What Does John Cage Have to Do with AI Authorship?
As some of you know I’m working on a project on the history of copyright protection for computer-generated works, aka AI authorship. As that piece slowly moves ahead I wanted to share one of the more surprising things I’ve discovered which seems relevant – the history of copyright registration for musical works utilizing chance and randomness. To cut to the chase, in the 1960s the U.S. Copyright Office considered registrations of a number of such works, and determined that in cases where there was not sufficient musical authorship – most famously in the “silent piece” 4’33”, registration could be made of the instructions as a textual work. This seems like it could operate as a precedent for registering the prompts fed into generative AI like ChatGPT even if the output is not registrable at the U.S. Copyright Office.