Copyright for Literate Robots

By James Grimmelmann. 2015

35 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Almost by accident, copyright has concluded that copyright law is for humans only: reading performed by computers doesn't count as infringement. Conceptually, this makes sense: copyright's ideal of romantic readership involves humans writing for other humans. But in an age when more and more manipulation of copyrighted works is carried out by automated processes, this split between human reading (infringement) and robotic reading (exempt) has odd consequences and creates its own tendencies toward a copyright system in which humans occupy a surprisingly peripheral place. This essay describes the shifts in fair use law that brought us here and reflects on the role of robots in copyright's cosmology.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Information Systems, Marketing, Robotics & Control, Philosophy

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Artificial Intelligence

1. Percy Liang
2. Dan Jurafsky
3. Tatsunori B. Hashimoto
4. Mohit Bansal
5. Luke S. Zettlemoyer
6. Noah A. Smith
7. Yejin Choi
8. Peter Henderson

In Information Systems

1. Percy Liang
2. Dan Jurafsky
3. Mark A. Lemley
4. Tatsunori B. Hashimoto
5. Xuechen Li
6. Peter Henderson
7. Luke S. Zettlemoyer
8. Panupong Pasupat

In Marketing

1. Percy Liang
2. Dan Jurafsky
3. Mark A. Lemley
4. Tatsunori B. Hashimoto
5. Xuechen Li
6. Peter Henderson

In Robotics & Control

1. Peter Henderson

In Philosophy

1. Percy Liang
2. Dan Jurafsky
3. Tatsunori B. Hashimoto

Citations in the corpus

• Foundation Models and Fair Use (2023, background): “This is why many have pointed out that this dilemma of how to treat foundation models fundamentally requires thinking more deeply about the underlying goals of copyright law and fair use (Grimmelmann, 2015; Sobel, 2017; Lemley & Casey, 2020).”