Monkeying Around with Copyright - Animals, AIs and Authorship in Law

Advances in artificial intelligence have changed the ways in which computers create “original” work. Analogies that may have worked sufficiently well in the past, when the technology had few if any commercially viable applications, are now reaching the limit of their usefulness. This paper considers particularly radical thought experiment in relation to computer generated art, challenging the legal responses to computer generated works and discussing their similarity to works by animals.