The permeation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) over our everyday lives began humbly enough less than a century ago, with AI growing and now substituting what were once deemed inherent human traits: voice recognition, automated driving, and even creating music, paintings, and novels. Consequently, it has now become impossible to live one day without the help of AI. Despite the ever-evolving nature of AI technology, laws concerning AI copyrights in South Korea remain stagnant and underdeveloped. In light of this cultural lag, it is questionable whether the South Korean government is efficiently managing to resolve whether to grant AI copyrights.
The second clause of South Korea’s copyright laws claims that “Copyright materials include creations that express humans’ emotions and ideas.” From 1963, the copyright law contributed to developing the culture by protecting creators and promoting the fair use of creations—nonetheless outdated in the status quo. As mentioned, the clause denotes that copyright owners must be humans; the status of AI creators is not defined. Though deciding whether AI can be deemed as an owner of its creation seems like a simple wordplay, it affects our lives in every aspect, especially in South Korea’s business markets.
Business Damages in South Korea
The absence of strict AI copyright laws also beset several business industries concerning AI in South Korea. One of the companies suffering from AI copyright damages is Kakaobrain, a subsidiary of Kakao Corporation founded in 2017 and an AI frontier working on its large-scale AI model and digital humans. Their recent invention coined SIA is an AI that writes poetry based on Kakaobrains’ large-scale AI language model called Korean Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (KoGPT). SIA even published its collection of poetry entitled Why I Write Poetry on August 8, 2022.
Despite the AI artist’s sensation, the company encountered unexpected difficulties regarding AI copyright. SIA could not register to issue copyright for its creations. Since no laws acknowledge AI or technology as eligible to become a copyright owner, SIA was prohibited from being declared a legal creator in accordance with South Korea’s intellectual property rights (IPRs). Although the copyright problem seems to have been temporarily resolved by registering joint ownership between companies, this ambiguity of defining copyright owner may become loopholes concerning practical, legal measures when faced with copyright piracies.
Another company demanding urgent clarification regarding AI copyright laws is a South Korean startup company called POZAlabs. Founded in January 2018, POZAlabs aims to launch all genres of music by analyzing their standardized features such as hip-hop, instrumentals, and electronic dance music (EDM). Although POZAlabs awaits glorious success with its quick, low-cost AI composing technology, its goals are overshadowed by the absence of AI copyright laws. POZAlab claims to expand its genres to create popular songs and plans to upload them on streaming platforms, but it is not yet clear who should be registered as a copyright owner. POZAlabs wrestled with this issue by creating its own independent music platform viodio, but failed to become mainstream; the top three music platforms already hold 15.73 million people of Monthly Active Users (MAU) in total.
The Need to Bite the Bullet
Guidelines and laws show how South Korea is poorly coping with the problem of AI copyrights compared to other countries. Japan started revising AI-related laws in 2016 as the public need had risen to clarify AI database usage. In terms of AI learning data utilization, the Japanese government enabled the use of digital data without restriction. Thus, freedom in data access facilitated machine learning to source from open data. The definition of AI copyright was also redefined to recognize the rights of the person who promoted AI creation. Other cases even concern giving identity to AI. In the case of the European Union (EU), a resolution acknowledging the legal status of AI as an “electronic identity” was adopted in 2017, and laws for AI copyright protection are being enacted.
Currently, South Korea does not consider AI as an eligible creator in copyright laws, defining humans as the sole authority eligible to license copyright. Unlike Japan and the United States (U.S.), which have clarified their stance on AI copyright laws, South Korea’s copyright office seems vague and does not reflect the recent changes. South Korea began discussions on revising IPRs in 2020, resulting in fruitless outcomes until now. On December 24, 2020, South Korea’s Ministry of Science and Information Communication Technology (MSIT) announced the “AI Law, System, and Regulation Maintenance Roadmap” during the national policy conference, presided over by the former Minister, Jeong Se Gyun. One of the 30 goals includes examining AI juristic personality and clarifying AI database usage. Nevertheless, these discussions failed to produce proper rules.
Why is the South Korean government postponing the revision of AI copyright laws? The issue stems from the difficulty of balancing interests in terms of fair use regulations of AI databases. In other words, many human creators currently oppose the revision of copyright laws due to the possibility of restrictions on exercising copyrights, while the industry consents to revise the law for the free use of data sources for AI deep learning. Therefore, the dilemma between people wanting to use AI’s creations at no extra cost and the desire to protect human-made data legally slows down the revision of the copyright law. “While requiring human copyright holders to restrict their rights, industry prioritizes the legal protection of the data that AI creates,” stated Special Professor Kim Yun Myung (Sangmyung University).
According to Kim Il Du, a representative of Kakaobrain, in an interview with Joseon Ilbo, they plan to continue exploring various cultural and artistic fields with their product. Should South Korea continue to propel itself as an IT Powerhouse, the South Korean government must focus on clarifying AI copyright laws exigently. For sure, it would be a challenging task to start by arguing whether AIs should be given a juristic entity. Also, reaching an agreement between AI industries and human creators may be a tough task. However, for South Korea to pave the way for many possibilities of AI usage, the government should bite the bullet and start enacting clearly defined laws.