A Chinese court has ruled that AI-generated works are entitled to copyright protection, in a win for tech giant Tencent.
According to state media outlet China News Service (CNS), a court in Shenzhen this month ruled in favour of Tencent, which claimed that work created by its Dreamwriter robot had been copied by a local financial news company.
The Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court ruled that, in copying the Dreamwriter article, Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company had infringed Tencent’s copyright.
Dreamwriter is an automated writing system created by Tencent and based on the company’s own algorithms.
According to the reports, Shanghai Yingxun reposted a financial report written by Dreamwriter in August 2018 without Tencent’s permission.
The question of whether AI-generated works are protectable under copyright law have been the subject of much debate.
In December, the European Patent Office (EPO) rejected a patent application listing Dabus, an AI application, as an inventor.
Speaking to CNS, Wang Guohua, lawyer at Beijing-based law firm Zhongwen, said that “human intelligence is the core and premise” of Chinese copyright law.
“According to our copyright law as well as some international conventions, the definition of a work first emphasizes that the creation is original, reproducible and produced based on human intellectual activity,” he said.
“Since machines can be used by anyone and generate the same content under the same keywords, we need to think about what exactly the copyright law protects the intellectual activity of choosing keywords or a work really created by human intelligence,” Wang added.
The damages in the case were minimal, with the Shanghai company being ordered to pay RMB1,500 ($216) for the infringement.
