The Legal Concept of Performative Copyright
Abstract
The advancement of neural networks in developing technologies for generating information objects rooted in humanity’s scientific and artistic heritage has intensified scholarly debate regarding the nature of computer-generated products, their eligibility for copyright protection, and the rightful ownership of such copyrights. This issue is exacerbated by the sociocultural landscape becoming inundated with an unbounded quantity of content artifacts characterized by ambiguous legal statuses. Such saturation adversely affects the efficacy of intellectual property rights protection for human authors and impedes their capacity to utilize publicly accessible information for creative endeavors. The article critically examines the feasibility of automatic copyright protection amid the extensive generation of quasi-creative forms. The analysis centers on the legal conditions under which the creator of a generated artifact qualifies as a competent subject and the neural network-generated output qualifies as a protected work. It scrutinizes the legal capacity of claimants asserting authorship alongside the protectability of the alleged works in accordance with intellectual property doctrine criteria. The primary objective is to enhance the copyright acquisition mechanism to fulfill the institution’s goals within the emergent technological paradigm. The study introduces the concept of performative authorship, advocating for replacing the prevailing principle of automatic protection with a formal registration procedure for copyright conferral. A verification process is proposed for assessing the author’s legal capacity against defined criteria. Legal attributes distinguishing potentially protectable content generation outcomes from those disqualified as protected works are delineated. The paper hypothesizes and substantiates that the creative act evidences an inherently human inseparability of intellect and coordinated motor activity, culminating in the manifestation of a work in tangible form — a phenomenon defined here as the objectivation motor activity of creativity. The conclusion advocates broadening the doctrinal aims of copyright law to include the protection of the human author as an additional institutional objective.
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