That picture of your dog as an anime character spun up by ChatGPT? And that corny diss rap you coaxed out of Claude? These are not legally protectable forms of creative expression under current copyright law.

That…could be for the best. But as businesses hand generative AI the keys to more of their marketing, content, and coding operations, what does it mean for their ability to protect the copyrights of critical business materials?

In January, the US Copyright Office released a report holding that works created with generative AI are not eligible for copyright protection without evidence of human creative contributions—and that doesn’t include an elaborate prompt.

Then in March, a federal appeals court also affirmed that art created autonomously by AI cannot be copyrighted, the latest decision in inventor Stephen Thaler’s years-long quest to copyright an output from his “Creativity Machine” AI tool.

In the spring, we asked IP lawyers about where the fight around copyright protections stands when it comes to training foundation models. Now, we’re digging into the other side of the equation: questions around copyrighting AI output and what companies need to know if they’re tapping generative AI for creative and development work.

Keep reading here.—PK

There once was a time when a piece of software would be loaded from a disk onto your computer. And that was that; the software lived on that computer in perpetuity.

Over the last 25 years, that relationship between software provider and user has evolved drastically, transforming how the entire tech industry operates in the process. The growth of cloud computing and widespread internet connections gave rise to a new model for how businesses and people alike access digital technology: software as a service, or SaaS.

That model boosted a generation of bootstrapping startups that might not otherwise have been able to afford top-shelf enterprise software. Now, a new revolution in giant generative AI models could be poised to further shift tech industry business models.

Back-SaaS: But let’s back up. In September 2003, Adobe, already one of the top software makers in the world for graphic design, bundled its various offerings—Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and others—into a Creative Suite for the first time, setting the stage for the monumental shift to the web-only Creative Cloud nearly a decade later.

Keep reading here.—PK

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Edwin Olson can still hear the faint sound of the autonomous vehicle he helped build as part of MIT’s team for the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 as it returned from the hourslong competition.

“It was the most amazing feeling,” he told Tech Brew.

Nearly 20 years later, Olson is the CEO of an AV company of his own, May Mobility, and the industry is in a much different position than it was in the early days of self-driving vehicle technology.

Plenty of would-be contenders have come and gone. Leaders have emerged. Lots of modern vehicles now come equipped with some automated features, and fully self-driving vehicles are operating on a limited basis—progress is being made. But hype around people being ferried to and fro in AVs on a mass scale has collided with technical, regulatory, and scalability challenges. Yet industry stakeholders are still working toward a future where many more of our transportation needs are met by driverless vehicles—and someday by steering wheel- and pedal-free ones.

“The public sentiment was significantly ahead of the technical reality…And then what basically happened is, the technical reality got ahead of public sentiment. And I think that’s where we are right now,” Olson said.

Keep reading here.—JG