Copyright Alliance Statement on HJC IP Subcommittee’s ‘AI and Copyright Hearing’

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Eileen Bramlet ebramlet@copyrightalliance.org

Washington, DC—In response to today’s House Judiciary Committee’s (HJC) IP Subcommittee hearing titled, Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property: Part I—Interoperability of AI and Copyright Law, Copyright Alliance CEO Keith Kupferschmid issued the following statement:

“We applaud the House Judiciary Committee’s Intellectual Property Subcommittee for holding today’s hearing on artificial intelligence (AI) and copyright law and for recognizing the tremendous impact of AI on the copyright and creator community.

“There are significant harms caused to the creative community when AI developers ignore copyright law and allow their AI programs to ingest copyrighted works without obtaining permission from—or compensating—the copyright owners of the works they use.

“Licensing models for AI ingestion already exist for many types of copyrighted works, including literary works and works of visual art, which AI developers recognize as valuable training material for large language models (LLMs) and image generators. While some AI companies are transparent that they only use licensed material to train their systems, others have used works scraped from the internet without authorization and have ignored available licenses.

“Thankfully, recent comments by some leading AI companies have acknowledged the copyright issues surrounding the unauthorized use of copyrighted works for ingestion purposes and recognize that they must respect copyright law and properly compensate copyright owners for the use of their works. Time will tell whether these companies are true to their word.

“We hope today’s hearing will be the beginning of a process that sheds more light on the significant concerns relating to AI and copyright. We stand ready to work with members of Congress, the U.S. Copyright Office, AI developers, and all other stakeholders to address the challenges that lay ahead.”

To read the Copyright Alliance’s policy position paper on AI and Copyright, please click here.

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ABOUT THE COPYRIGHT ALLIANCE

The Copyright Alliance is a non-profit, non-partisan public interest and educational organization representing the copyright interests of 2 million individual creators and 15,000 organizations in the United States, across the spectrum of copyright disciplines. The Copyright Alliance is dedicated to advocating policies that promote and preserve the value of copyright, and to protecting the rights of creators and innovators. For more information, please visit our website.