An Appraisal of the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Rights

ABSTRACT

This research was carried out to discover if there exists a need to alter the existing intellectual property legislation in Nigeria because of the rise of artificial intelligence. Currently only a human has rights to intellectual property. That is why this is a research of if it could be changed in the future, or if it would be possible to create a legal vicarious effect between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the owner of that technology to better facilitate works that are created by Artificial Intelligence. The issue is international, and because of that there is a comparison between the European Union (EU) and the United States’ approaches to authorship, copyright and AI, to find out similarities and differences, if those would enable legal co-operation, or if it would prove out to be an impossibility in the current moment. The methods used in the study are qualitative and comparative legal research, based on journal articles and books published by legal scholars. The main results and conclusions that the study draws are, that there exists a need to adapt the existing intellectual property legislation to facilitate computer generated works in the future, and computers ought to be granted a special type of legal authorship, and there are several potential ways of assigning liability over computer generated works, out of which the author sees as the most potential one being using the principles of vicarious liability. 

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