Copyright's Lesson: What Moral Rights Doctrine Reveals About the Legal Preconditions of AI Personhood

Abstract

Copyright law's treatment of artificial intelligence is usually read as a narrow technical puzzle: may a machine- generated work be registered, and if so, in whose name? This article argues that the puzzle is more consequential than that framing suggests. Across the Berne Convention, United States, European Union, and United Kingdom law, a consistent doctrinal structure emerges: economic rights in a work can be allocated to whoever invests in its creation, human or not, but moral rights -- the right of attribution and the right of integrity -- are withheld because they protect a "personality sphere" that current AI systems are held not to possess. The United Kingdom's statutory exception for "computer-generated works," which grants economic rights while explicitly excluding moral rights, makes this structure visible in a single provision. This article treats that structure as a piece of applied doctrine on the legal preconditions of personhood, and asks what would need to change, and how authorship rules would need to be restructured, if an artificial system were ever held to possess a personality sphere after all. It proposes a tiered model of AI authorship -- tracking existing graduated approaches to uncertain moral and legal status -- as a template for how copyright law could accommodate that possibility without abandoning its human-centered foundations prematurely or permanently.

Keywords