Who owns an AI generated song? What we can learn from the phonograph and the evolution of copyright laws

Artificial intelligence can now generate songs and artworks in seconds—raising a fundamental question: should copyright law protect works created without human authorship? Most legal systems currently say no. But per The Conversation, history suggests otherwise. Sound recordings faced identical skepticism when recording technology emerged in the late eighteen hundreds. Early courts treated them as mere mechanical reproductions rather than creative works deserving protection. English and Welsh law didn't grant recordings copyright protection until thirty-four years after Edison's phonograph appeared. The US waited until nineteen seventy-one, France until nineteen eighty-five. Yet as the recording industry grew, copyright law adapted, eventually recognizing recordings as protected intellectual property. If that pattern holds, the debate may soon shift from whether AI-generated works deserve protection to whether copyright can still be called intellectual property at all if human creativity is no longer essential to it.

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