WHO OWNS MACHINE-MADE ART?
Machines that paint pictures and write music have been a favorite subject of science fiction for decades. In October 2018, an auction in New York showed that they were no longer imaginary: a portrait produced by a computer program was sold there for more than 400,000 dollars. Since that sale, a growing number of universities have been working on programs that can create images, poems and songs in a matter of seconds. Some of these programs, built by research teams in several countries, including Canada and South Korea, make pictures that are hard to tell apart from the work of human artists.(lines 1–6)
It did not take long for businesses to see the commercial value of these programs. Within a few years, dozens of companies were offering their own versions online. Most of them earn money by charging customers a monthly fee for pictures that can be used in advertisements, websites and book covers. The programs themselves improved at an amazing speed. This was largely thanks to the millions of images that the companies collected from the Internet. By studying these images, the programs learned to copy almost any style, from ancient cave paintings to modern cartoons.(lines 7–13)
Laws that protect artists are far older than computers. In 1886, a group of countries signed the Berne Convention, an international agreement on copyright – the right of creators to decide how their work is copied and sold. Today, more than 180 countries belong to it. Copyright is not the only legal protection; inventions, for example, are protected by patents. However, the two systems work very differently. An inventor receives a patent only after officials have examined the invention and approved it, a process that can take years. A song or a painting, on the other hand, is protected automatically from the moment it is created. Yet neither system was designed with machines in mind, so in many countries it is still unclear whether a machine-made picture belongs to anyone.(lines 14–21)
Now that machine-made pictures are everywhere on the Internet, lawyers and artists are arguing about who should own them. "The old copyright laws were written for human creators, so they say nothing about works produced by a machine," says technology journalist Maya Levin. "The companies claim that the pictures should be theirs because they spent years and huge amounts of money developing the programs. But many artists are furious. They argue that the programs learned by copying their work without asking permission or paying anything."(lines 22–27)
According to many legal experts, the problem can only be solved by a new international agreement that sets clear rules for machine-made art. Such an agreement could require companies, for example, to put a clear label on every picture that their programs create for customers. "To respect the original purpose of copyright, artists must also be paid whenever their work is used to train a program," says Levin. "Young artists who cannot afford lawyers need this protection most of all. Only then will art made by machines be fair to the people who made it possible."(lines 28–33)