Machine learning develops; Congress passes new copyright legislation.
Congress passes the comprehensive Copyright Act of 1909 and then proceeds to update it with a series of amendments over the next few decades, including provisions enabling films to be copyrighted as a whole rather than requiring producers to seek protection for each frame.
The fields of linguistics and machine learning develop. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener establishes the field of cybernetics, the science of communication and control of communication in humans and machines.
Mathematician Alan Turing, who helped the Allies win World War II by breaking German codes, explores the idea of machine learning, positing an experiment to determine whether machines can think by seeing whether a computer can have a conversation with a human that the human believes is with another person. Originally dubbed the imitation game, the concept has come to be known as the Turing test.
John McCarthy of MIT coins the phrase “artificial intelligence” at a workshop at Dartmouth College. Computer pioneer Marvin Minsky defines it as “the construction of computer programs that engage in tasks that are currently more satisfactorily performed by human beings because they require high-level mental processes such as: perceptual leaning, memory organization and critical reasoning.”
Computer scientists develop generative artificial intelligence.
Generative artificial intelligence, or generative AI, is introduced in the form of rudimentary chatbots. Humans could type limited phrases and the computer was programmed to answer with set phrases.
President Gerald Ford signs the Copyright Act of 1976 into law. Amendments in the next few years greatly extend the time period covered by copyright to as much as 120 years from the date of creation.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 make hacking illegal and define when one may take and use publicly available material from the internet in the process known as scraping.
Machine learning emerges and becomes more advanced.
After years of scientists working to advance AI incrementally, IBM creates what it touts as a breakthrough: It programs a computer by feeding it massive numbers of images and texts and asks it to find patterns it can then use to identify or produce similar objects. The concept becomes known as machine learning.
Computer scientist Ian Goodfellow and colleagues create generative adversarial networks, or GANs, a type of algorithm that helps machines better use statistics to increase their precision in detecting patterns and replicating them. GANs enable computers to better hunt down patterns in big sets of data, then use those patterns to improve computer visual recognition, speech, writing and crafting of images and art.
In a key fair-use case, Google wins the right to excerpt and provide for free large portions of written works of fiction and nonfiction, defeating a challenge by the Authors Guild.
Computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal and colleagues at Rutgers University create what is arguably the first computer to make art autonomously.
Generative AI becomes more sophisticated, sparks debate about copyright violations.
The company OpenAI unveils ChatGPT, the most sophisticated machine learning-powered text generation computer program to date, which creates conversations, essays and other texts that in many respects sound and read as if they had been crafted by a human.
Lawyers file a class action lawsuit against three prominent generative AI companies — Stability AI, Midjourney and DeviantArt — on behalf of three artists claiming copyright violations. They argue that the big data sets the computers use to detect and then generate similar patterns include copyrighted works used without consent from or payment to the creators. Getty Images, owner of one of the biggest copyrighted sets of photos and other material, files a similar suit against Stability AI (January)…. The U.S. Copyright Offices rules that images generated by a computer are not protected by copyright, reversing its ruling from September 2022 (February).
Reference: Day, K. (2023). Artificial intelligence and intellectual property. In CQ Researcher. CQ Press. https://doi.org/10.4135/cqresrre20230421