AI tools are raising copyright issues in South Africa
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — Legal experts in South Africa (SA) are calling for a review of the country’s Copyright Act to accommodate emerging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies like ChatGPT.
According to Sabinet, a Southern African research content and journal aggregator, the rise of AI platforms raised many questions and concerns regarding the potential implications for intellectual property rights.
AI content-generating platforms like ChatGPT can produce content like articles, essays, and music. Sabinet said this might lead to confusion on who owns the rights to the content made by AI tools.
SA-based law firm Michalsons adds that one of the main legal risks of ChatGPT is its potential to infringe on IP rights.
“ChatGPT is trained on a vast amount of text data, including books, articles, and other written materials… If this training data includes copyrighted works, then ChatGPT’s outputs may potentially infringe on the copyrights of those works. This could lead to legal action against you, who may be seen as contributing to the infringement,” the law firm added.
South Africa’s Copyright Act 98 of 1978 grants the owner the exclusive right to do certain things or prevent doing certain things concerning copyrighted material. However, specific exceptions can be raised as defenses to copyright infringement, including private use or for the purposes of research or private study, criticism or review, or reporting current events.
It also lacks provisions for computer-generated materials, which could bring confusion between original creators and AI users.
