Question
Emery is a software engineer employed by FezziCorp, a tech company specialising in artificial intelligence. His role at FezziCorp is to broaden the knowledge base
Emery is a software engineer employed by FezziCorp, a tech company specialising in artificial intelligence. His role at FezziCorp is to broaden the knowledge base and accessibility of its proprietary AI system, called "ROSE." In his free time, Emery likes to work on his own AI system for which he is writing all the code. It is a project that he has been working on for years and some of the code used for it helped him get the job with FezziCorp. Sometimes, he uses the servers at FezziCorp after hours to run his ROBIN software. One night, he stayed late after work writing code that enabled ROBIN to create images based on prompts entered by the user. As a test to the code, Emery asked ROBIN to "create images of an eerie castle built on a space station outside of this galaxy." ROBIN generated an image according to this prompt. Emery, struck by the beauty of the image ROBIN created, entered it in a digital art competition, titling it "Castle in the Clouds." Emery was awarded 1st place in the competition and revealed in an interview afterwards that the image was actually created by his AI software, ROBIN. This caused massive backlash in the artistic community with criticism coming from other participants on social media and various news outlets. The Daily Mail ran a story titled "Artist Wins Competition but Admits Computer Created the Artwork, not Him." In this story, which was posted to their website and shared on all of the Daily Mail's social media, they included an image of "Castle in the Clouds" as well as images of the artworks that were awarded 2nd and 3rd place in the competition. They did not ask Emery for permission to use the "Castle in the Clouds" image.
Milly, the artist who received 2nd place in the competition was angry about the result. She created a new digital image of hundreds of robots in a factory all painting on canvases. On each canvas that the robot was painting she photoshopped the "Castle in the Clouds" image. She posted this image to her twitter page (which has 90,000 followers) with the caption "the future of art."
Since then, Emery has capitalised on his notoriety and is selling limited edition prints of "Castle in the Clouds" in a fancy London art gallery for 20,000 each.
Advise regarding the copyright issues:
1: Discuss all possible creative works mentioned in this scenario created by Emery and/or ROBIN that may be protected by copyright, how/why they would be protected and how long protection would last.
2: Assuming "Castle in the Clouds" is protected by copyright, would the Daily Mail's publication of it without permission be an infringement? Why or why not? Would Milly's, "The Future of Art," image and/or the posting of it to twitter be an infringement? Why or why not? Please discuss any relevant defences and remedies in your analysis.
3: Assuming the "Castle in the Clouds" is protected by copyright, who owns the copyright, Emery or FezziCorp? Why?
- Critically evaluate contentious intellectual property law issues, including emerging trends and developments.
- Apply current UK intellectual property law to construct appropriate solutions to legal problems.
- Compose accurate written legal advice, using appropriate writing style and referencing.
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