Library Copyright Alliance Principles for Copyright and Artificial Intelligence; Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), July 10, 2023

Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL); Library Copyright Alliance Principles for Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

"The existing U.S. Copyright Act, as applied and interpreted by the Copyright Office and the courts, is fully capable at this time to address the intersection of copyright and AI without amendment.

• Based on well-established precedent, the ingestion of copyrighted works to create large language models or other AI training databases generally is a fair use.

  • Because tens—if not hundreds—of millions of works are ingested to create an LLM, the contribution of any one work to the operation of the LLM is de minimis; accordingly, remuneration for ingestion is neither appropriate nor feasible.

  • Further, copyright owners can employ technical means such as the Robots Exclusion Protocol to prevent their works from being used to train AIs.

• If an AI produces a work that is substantially similar in protected expression to a work that was ingested by the AI, that new work infringes the copyright in the original work.

• If the original work was registered prior to the infringement, the copyright owner of the original work can bring a copyright infringement action for statutory damages against the AI provider and the user who prompted the AI to produce the substantially similar work.

• Applying traditional principles of human authorship, a work that is generated by an AI might be copyrightable if the prompts provided by the user sufficiently controlled the AI such that the resulting work as a whole constituted an original work of human authorship.

AI has the potential to disrupt many professions, not just individual creators. The response to this disruption (e.g., not be treated as a means for addressing these broader societal challenges. support for worker retraining through institutions such as community colleges and public libraries) should be developed on an economy-wide basis, and copyright law should not be treated as a means for addressing these broader societal challenges.

AI also has the potential to serve as a powerful tool in the hands of artists, enabling them to express their creativity in new and efficient ways, thereby furthering the objectives of the copyright system."