Robojournalism – A Copyright Study on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in the European News Industry

Abstract

The copyright protectability of outputs generated by, or with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hotly debated question in academia and by many institutions. In practice, sophisticated AI algorithms have become a meaningful assistant in the European news industry for the reporting of sports (Retresco’s collaboration with the German Football Association), weather (textOmatic’s collaboration with FOCUS Online) and finance (the Guardian’s ‘Guarbot’). Furthermore, for the first time in copyright history a court in China assessed the validity of a company’s copyright claim over the articles produced by the corporation’s algorithm. The protection with copyright of this ‘robojournalism’ is no longer just a buzzwordy trend. From a technological perspective, robojournalism currently relies on assistive, generative and distributive technologies. The first two seem to be the most problematic from a copyright perspective as they challenge the well-rooted human authorship requirement. Experts have been able to agree so far that it does not look like AI technology is going to be a disruptive force in the media industry. However, researching the impact of AI in journalism matters a great deal. There are numerous benefits stemming from the use of AI in the newsroom – from expanding news coverage, through faster content production, all the way to leaving journalists more time for the more ‘creative’ and investigative tasks where the algorithm remains weak. This paper addresses, first, the protectability of the outputs of robojournalism under the existing European Union copyright laws. It then goes on to introduce findings related to the practical significance of robojournalism in the European news industry. Here, our focus is on the business, media, and communications studies’ perspectives of automated journalism. Our results demonstrate that the extent to which European journalism relies on assistive and generative technologies to produce written output does not justify, from a copyright perspective, the changing of the current anthropocentric copyright system. These findings have wider implications as AI-generated outputs have prompted many to talk about market failure if copyright (or related rights) protection was to be refused for such works.1

Inteligencia artificial, noticias y medios de comunicación: Una aproximación jurídica desde la perspectiva de la propiedad intelectual

“…Lo que se ha dado en llamar "periodismo automatizado" (automated journalism), algorítmico o robot journalism (Trapova y Mezei, 2021) necesita, siempre e indefectiblemente, de una intervención al menos inicial humana. Siempre es un humano (un autor individual o, y aquí está uno de los quid del problema, una organización o persona jurídica) quien da las indicaciones o prompts (Murray, 2023) a partir de las cuales el programa las ejecuta y ofrece un resultado, mejor o peor.…”

Emergence of Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence in the Intellectual Property System

“…If one just asks one specific question, one might also ask whether AI that synthesizes data to create new news can be considered a journalist. If so, is it protected by copyright law (Trapova & Mezei, 2022)?…”

Merging or plagiarizing? The role of originality and derivative works in AI-aimed news production

“…They have already done, as a matter of fact. The most presumed creative or generative artificial intelligence systems pose major legal problems, much more than the other types of AI applied to, for instance, the business of news: assistive and distributive (Trapova and Mezei, 2021). Let us consider the case of generative music, not really a newcomer though: such tools, just to mention a couple, Wotja or Nodal, are well-known and used by musicians some time ago.…”

“…Be that as it may, the situation today is that "data collection and processing, news coverage could expand exponentially" (Trapova and Mezei, 2021). From an optimistic point of view, we wish to align with Daniel J. Gervais, when he says that "the presence of creative choices in the making of the work is the only adequate test to determine whether the work is worthy of copyright protection" (Gervais, 2002, p. 981).…”