From an intellectual property perspective, the factors determining whether Artificial Intelligence programs are protected by copyright are the same as for ordinary computer programs. In contrast, the question of intelligent systems to act as authors is particularly interesting. In this case, the key issue is to the identity of the copyright owner: Is it the software, software copyright holders, users of the software, both or no one.

The Anglo-American and civil laws differ in this respect. In the U.S. and the UK, a work may be copyrighted, even if it is machine generated. There is a specific rule in the UK concerning computer-generated works and in the United States this conclusion can be achieved through interpretation. In Finland and elsewhere in Europe, it is assumed that copyrighted works should be made by man: The result of a mechanical operation is not entitled to copyright protection. Works of this kind shall not be regarded as independent and original as required by copyright law. Copyright to works created by an intelligent system does not belong to anyone. The civil law tradition emphasizes the importance of moral rights, which are connected to the author’s personality. In contrast, the Anglo-American copyright tradition is based on the economic rights and moral rights are largely ignored. The European Commission has drawn attention to the special provision on computer-generated works in the UK.  The Commission is concerned that the provision does not comply with the software Directive due to the broad scope of copyright protection granted thereunder.

The copyright system is meant to encourage the creation of works. It is true that machines do not need incentives to create. Machine-generated output, however, is affected by a number of people who, for example, program the machine. These people obviously need incentives, just as the author of a book or a composer. Copyright protection for machine-generated works would encourage the development of useful technology. In this sense, copyright protection should be available, also for machine-generated content, and should not be categorically prohibited, even if work performed by machines is to some extent mechanical. For example, short telegraph news are not necessarily protected irrespective of whether they are written by a man or machine. This kind of assessment of the creativity prerequisite is necessary. The assessment should not, however, be exclusively linked to a requirement that the direct author should be a man.

In the preparatory works and legal literature in the United States,  in the UK legislation and in Finnish preparatory works , authorship is allocated to the user of the software. The software programmer is ignored in this respect although the contribution by the programmer should be recognized. User actions may be extremely simple. This is the case when the user presses a button to compose. In intermediate works the output has been produced by the computer user and the computer programmer and/or a person producing the database. Therefore, both the user and the programmer should be considered co-authors in such cases. The most practical option to achieve this result would be to agree on a contract. However, it is obviously not possible to validly agree on the fulfillment of threshold for copyrightability.

This is an excerpt of an article published in Viestintäoikeuden vuosikirja 2010, Forum Iuris, Helsinki 2011, VII + 200 pages. Unfortunately, the book is only available in Finnish:

http://www.helsinki.fi/katti/julkaisu220211.htm

The paper on intelligent machines and legal liability has been published in the Nordic Journal of Commercial Law: http://www.njcl.utu.fi/

James Boyle of Duke Law School has written a nice paper on the issues around constitutional personhood for artificial intelligence. You’ll recall Lawrence Solum’s wonderful North Carolina Law Review article on AI and legal personhood from 1992. Solum was interested in whether soft AI might meet the technical requirements of a legal entity such as the executor of a trust. Boyle’s argument is more (too?) ambitious. Here’s an excerpt:

My point is a simple one. In the coming century, it is overwhelmingly likely that constitutional law will have to classify artificially created entities that have some but not all of the attributes we associate with human beings. They may look like human beings, but have a genome that is very different. Conversely, they may look very different, while genomic analysis reveals almost perfect genetic similarity. … How will, and how should, constitutional law meet these challenges?

I confess I am one of the “skeptics” Boyle refers to that “point to a history of overconfident predictions that the [AI] breakthrough was just around the corner.” We’ve been doing AI since that terms was coined at my alma matter in the 1950s and, as Mary-Anne Williams put it to me succinctly, robots today are about as smart as insects.

Boyle was specifically asked to write about the future. And he includes biologic possibilities that may be around an earlier corner. Either way, the paper is worth a read. (Hat tip to Gabe and Mike.)

Over Christmas, I received a series 530 Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner from iRobot. It cleans the floor really well. But that is all it does. This year at the Consumer Electronics Show, iRobot revealed the prototype AVA. It is, essentially, an open robotic platform. Think of it as an iPad with a body. It has no dedicated purpose and, importantly, it has an API and will run software made by third-party developers.

Yes, apps for robots. This is a wonderful development, one that I predicted in a forthcoming essay in Maryland Law Review. As iRobot founder Colin Angle points out, “If you think of the thousands of apps out there: Which iPad apps would be more cool if they moved?” More importantly, would you not be more inclined to buy a personal robot that came with thousands of programs, with more on the way.

AVA is representative of a sea change in thinking about robotic products. Just a couple of years ago, iRobot’s Angle was telling The Economist that general-purpose robots were unlikely and that we would have one robot for each task. Now iRobot is building a multi-purpose platform open to outside programmers.

The change can likely be traced back to the start up Willow Garage, home to the laundry folding, pool playing, beer shagging PR2. Willow Garage is betting that the next “killer app” will come from consumers or other, third-party innovators.

To read about the promise and challenges open robots pose, please check out Open Robotics. Your thoughts warmly welcome.

In a new paper, forthcoming from Maryland Law Review, I argue that consumer robotics will have to be sufficiently open to third party innovation to really take off.  Such openness, however, creates novel legal issues that may require statutory intervention.  Here’s the abstract:

With millions of home and service robots already on the market, and millions more on the way, robotics is poised to be the next transformative technology. As with personal computers, personal robots are more likely to thrive if they are sufficiently open to third-party contributions of software and hardware. No less than with telephony, cable, computing, and the Internet, an open robotics could foster innovation, spur consumer adoption, and create secondary markets.

But open robots also present the potential for inestimable legal liability, which may lead entrepreneurs and investors to abandon open robots in favor of products with more limited functionality. This possibility flows from a key difference between personal computers and robots. Like PCs, open robots have no set function, run third-party software, and invite modification. But unlike PCs, personal robots are in a position directly to cause physical damage and injury. Thus, norms against suit and expedients to limit liability such as the economic loss doctrine are unlikely to transfer from the PC and consumer software context to that of robotics.

This essay therefore recommends a selective immunity for manufacturers of open robotic platforms for what end users do with these platforms, akin to the immunity enjoyed under federal law by firearms manufacturers and websites. Selective immunity has the potential to preserve the conditions for innovation without compromising incentives for safety. The alternative is to risk being left behind in a key technology by countries with a higher bar to litigation and a serious head start.

The Wall Street Journal recently did a piece on the potential use of drones to stalk celebrities (and tail suspected adulterers).  I hope it’s not too late for me to include this example in my forthcoming book chapter on robots and privacy.  This would make a great example.  Here’s an excerpt from the WSJ:

Ms. Cummings predicted it’s just a matter of time before drone technology and safety improvements make the gadgets a common part of the urban landscape.

Privacy issues could emerge if such drones become common. While the military has rules of engagement governing drone use, there is no similar set of rules to protect privacy for domestic use of drones.

“If everybody had enough money to buy one of these things, we could all be wandering around with little networks of vehicles flying over our heads spying on us,” Ms. Cummings said. “It really opens up a whole new Pandora’s Box of: What does it mean to have privacy?”

Indeed.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed by ROBOTS, a wonderful podcast for news and opinions about robots. I discuss the state of robotics and the law, the issue of robots and liability, robots and privacy, and the future of robotics and artificial intelligence. You can listen to the podcast here.

In 1974 as a means to cast new light on the role of intentionality in consciousness and experience Thomas Nagel asked a simple question “what’s it like to be a bat?”. His question is still thought-provoking today as it furthers Wittgenstein’s suggestion that if a lion could speak, we would not understand him, in a more tangible but no less tantalizing way.

The field of robotics is beginning to provide new perspectives and insight on many age old philosophical questions and musings. Given the enormous potential impact robots will have on individuals and society, there is an exciting new opportunity to reconceptualize the role of intention and embodiment in subjective experience, and to explore the legal implications of robots in society.

The largely rationalist approach to robot design was challenged in the early 90s by Rodney Brooks and his behavior based robots that used sensory data to drive action choices without the need to build fancy fragile high maintenance models of the world.  Brooks took the innovative stance that robots do not need a model of the world to determine what to do next because they can simply sense it directly. He advocated the idea that the world is its own best representation. His view challenged the prevailing model-based approaches and although it has since been found to be lacking support for high level capabilities like planning and anticipation, Brooks certainly enriched the field by broadening mainstream robotics which now incorporates and no longer questions his once held extreme position.

If you are interested in these topics you can take a look at two papers that connect behaviour-based approaches to robot design with the philosophical stance that gives primacy to subjective experience. The first paper Representation = Grounded Information provides a new definition of intelligence, a concept that has proven to be difficult to define, and previously described using a circumscriptive but incomplete set of characteristics such as the ability to adapt to change and to learn from mistakes. The paper defines intelligence as the capability that produces representations. Representation making capabilities underpin traits associated with intelligence. For example, adapting to change requires an ability to make new representations for new situations, and learning involves the discovery and incorporation of new examples or whole new representations. Furthermore, the measure of intelligence can be given by measures of representation affordance. For example, deception is associated with high-end intelligence; reptitlian representations do not afford deception, but people over the age of 8 represent the minds of others with ease so human representations do afford deception.

The second paper Autonomy: Life and Being builds on the definitions of representation and intelligence; a genuinely autonomous system must be capable of making sense of its subjective experience, i.e. able to make representations of its own experience. An object is then determined to be alive if it can autonomously represent its own experience all by itself on the fly as it is experiencing. The paper offers a new high level cognitive architecture founded on a robot’s subjective experience that my research group is using to develop robot minds that allow a physical mobile robot to pay attention to different aspects of its subjective experience as it forages about, and importantly to anticipate future experiences. Check out the CMU Dive and the UTS Dodge for real examples of attention-driven anticipatory behaviors in robots.

Robots are destined to have a profound impact on society, indeed all aspects of life and being. Already they have capabilities in perception, information retrieval, data mining, computation, and morphology beyond our own. In order to address legal aspects of robotics in society we must develop a better understanding of autonomy and how it applies to robot experience.  Living entities are autonomous systems, and autonomy is vital to life. Could a genuinely autonomous robot have a right to life?  Our philosophical, scientific and legal understanding of autonomy and its implications lacks depth and clarity, and as a result progress towards designing, building, managing, exploiting and regulating autonomous systems is inhibited. Considering robot experiences during robot design will help us grapple with issues around safety, security, privacy, and liability; it will help us develop effective cues and social mores for robots as we interact. collaborate and develop a sense of social meaning with them. Without being too controversial it is probably safe to say that that robots today have representations derived from their experiences that afford insect-level intelligence  but it is inevitable that they will enjoy rich and meaningful experiences which are as vivid and intense as our own because the only way we can actually achieve the goal of genuine autonomy is to build robots that can make sense of their subjective experiences and attain cognitive independence from us!