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Copyright and Artificial Creation: Does EU Copyright Law Protect AI-Assisted Output?
Abstract
This article queries whether and to what extent works produced with the aid of AI systems – AI-assisted output – are protected under EU copyright standards. We carry out a doctrinal legal analysis to scrutinise the concepts of “work”, “originality” and “creative freedom”, as well as the notion of authorship, as set forth in the EU copyright acquis and developed in the case-law of the Court of Justice. On this basis, we develop a four-step test to assess whether AI-assisted output qualifies as an original work of authorship under EU law, and how the existing rules on authorship may apply. Our conclusion is that current EU copyright rules are generally suitable and sufficiently flexible to deal with the challenges posed by AI-assisted output.
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“A predominant human intellectual activity can be recognized, also based on the CJEU case law, when the human creator using an LLM makes free and creative choices in the phases of conception, execution, and/or redaction of the work [62].”
From Generative AI in EU law: Liability, privacy, intellectual property, and cybersecurity (2024) · cites this paper as [62]
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Cited by
Lund, B. D., Wang, T., Mannuru, N. R., Nie, B., Shimray, S., & Wang, Z. (2023) · Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.24750 · Cited by 919
Generative AI in EU law: Liability, privacy, intellectual property, and cybersecurity
Novelli, C., Casolari, F., Hacker, P., Spedicato, G., & Floridi, L. (2024) · Computer Law & Security Review · doi:10.1016/j.clsr.2024.106066 · Cited by 124
Al-Busaidi, A. S., Raman, R., Hughes, L., Albashrawi, M. A., Malik, T., Dwivedi, Y. K., Al- Alawi, T., AlRizeiqi, M., Davies, G., Fenwick, M., et al. (2024) · Journal of Innovation & Knowledge · doi:10.1016/j.jik.2024.100630 · Cited by 95
Generative Ai in EU Law: Liability, Privacy, Intellectual Property, and Cybersecurity
Novelli, C., Casolari, F., Hacker, P., Spedicato, G., & Floridi, L. (2024) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.4821952 · Cited by 57
Goodyear, M. (2025) · SSRN Electronic Journal · doi:10.2139/ssrn.5184405 · Cited by 2
Metadata
- Authors
- Hugenholtz, P. B., & Quintais, J. P.
- ORCID
- Quintais, João Pedro
- Venue
- IIC - International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law
- Published
- 2021-10
- Volume
- 52
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 1190-1216
- ISSN
- 0018-9855
- 2195-0237
- Cited by
- 103
- References
- 1
- Language
- en
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