Dr Barry Scannell

Dr Barry Scannell, partner at William Fry and a member of Ireland’s AI Advisory Council, said a recent court ruling in Germany had highlighted Ireland’s “unusual” position.

Munich District Court this month dismissed a copyright claim over three logos after finding that a person who created them with generative AI could not claim them as their own work.

Dr Scannell said in a LinkedIn post yesterday that the “unsurprising” ruling reflected the “deeply anthropocentric” nature of copyright law in the EU.

However, he pointed out that Ireland takes a different position in the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000, which says the author of a computer-generated work is “the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken”.

Dr Scannell said: “The provision has never been tested in court. Yet it remains on the Irish statute book, creating a framework under which AI-generated outputs could attract copyright protection even where no human creative choice shaped the expressive content.

“That sits uncomfortably alongside the EU’s CJEU harmonised originality standard, which, as the Munich court confirmed, requires human creative influence to be objectively identifiable in the final output.”

He added: “Whether section 21(f) [of the 2000 Act] can be reconciled with the CJEU’s originality jurisprudence is a question policymakers should address before a court is forced to.”