The Copyright, Text & Data Mining and the Innovation dimension of Generative AI

The rise of the Generative AI has raised many a questions from the perspective of copyright. From the lens of copyright and database rights, questions revolve not only around the authorship of these AI-generated works, but also the very process that leads to the generation of these works, namely the process of text and data mining (TDM). Does TDM infringe the economic rights of the right holders? How does the TDM-debate transform and transmute in the age of Generative AI? Generative AI-tools create works that substitute the content creators whose very work that they learn from, and successively improvise themselves with every sequential iteration. Generative AI, thus, also presents a much larger question as they substitute the romaticised human author that sits at the center of copyright. In addition, as Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can now also crawl the web, questions thus, transcends the frontiers of copyright, and touch upon the issue of innovation and competition in the market for web browsers. This research article contemplates on some of these issues, and makes some recommendations to creative a balancing framework, whereby incentives to innovate are preserved, and the interests of the human author are suitably safeguarded in the age of text and data mining and Generative AI.