Merging or plagiarizing? The role of originality and derivative works in AI-aimed news production

Abstract

The emergence of artificial intelligence systems applied to news production raises a series of legal questions that we examine in this short article. The central concept is, in our opinion, that of originality and creativity, legal requirements for attributing authorship and setting in motion the mechanisms of legal protection for a work, be it simple or collaborative, or even composite. The type of work that raises most questions is the derivative work, obtained from the transformation of pre-existing work(s), whose rights of authorship and economic exploitation must be respected at all times. The practices of learning systems based on artificial intelligence, which explicitly recognise that they rely on a wide variety of works protected by copyright, pose many doubts, and are not clearly able to benefit from the fair use exception, which, moreover, is only applicable to works produced in Common law jurisdictions, but not in other countries with an authorial system of intellectual property protection.