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From: lawitzke@eecae.UUCP (John Lawitzke)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Who owns the output of an AI?
Message-ID: <3804@eecae.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 11-Nov-87 08:55:51 EST
Article-I.D.: eecae.3804
Posted: Wed Nov 11 08:55:51 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 13-Nov-87 23:34:04 EST
References: <1778@svax.cs.cornell.edu>
Organization: Engineering, Michigan State U., E. Lansing MI
Lines: 28

$    The law says that the output of an AI is owned by the user running the
$ AI, NOT the programmer who designed it.
$ 
$    Is this fare? Should copywrites go to the user or the programmer? (or to
$ the AI :-)? To me the British law seems unfair. If my AI program discovered
$ a new high temperature super-conductor, shouldn't I get some profit? The
$ user running my program may know nothing about super-conductors, why should
$ he get the patent?
$    What do you think?

For the author of an AI to get the copyright/ownership of a users
results is like the author of SPICE (or similar programs) getting
the rights to all designs generated with it. Or UCB getting the rights
to all programs designed under 4.2BSD, et al. Or the author of a CAD
program having the copyright on all designs generated with the package.
The point of this is that it is rather absurd for the results of a
user's work under an AI to go to the author of the AI. For one thing,
the AI would never be used by anyone because they couldn't keep the
credit for their own work!

The one glaring loophole here is that the license for the AI could state
that the author reserves ownership of all results (then no one would
buy it) or that the author receives a royalty from all results
(reasonable but people wouldn't go for it)

-- 
j                                UUCP: ...ihnp4!msudoc!eecae!lawitzke
"And it's just a box of rain..." ARPA: lawitzke@eecae.ee.msu.edu  (35.8.8.151)