Lockean Labor Theory And Artificial Intelligence: Can Traditional Justifications Sustain Copyright For AI-Generated Works?
- IJLLR Journal
- Sep 22
- 2 min read
Sharwani Pandey, Atal Bihari Vajpayee School of Legal Studies, Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University, Kanpur
Dr. Pramod Kumar, Atal Bihari Vajpayee School of Legal Studies, Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University, Kanpur
1. Introduction
For a long time, the connection between work and ownership of property has been a central theme in Western political and legal philosophy since the 1600s. In his landmark work, Two Treatises of Government (1690), John Locke conveyed the idea that as soon as a person mixes their labor with things from nature, ownership belongs to that person. In Locke’s context, the process of working changes the thing that was previously common into private property, and by that, implies a certain right to exclude other people. Just to clarify, while Locke’s model was tied up with land, farming, and other material resources, the impact of his concept has gone a long way that it could be seen in the notion of property in the nonphysical world.
At the time of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the labor theory of John Locke was not only directing but also beginning the issues of works of an intellectual nature. Although language, ideas, and cultural symbols are common things, they are said to carry the hallmark of personal labor when an author exerts intellectual labor to organize and express them in a distinct manner. Consequently, copyright came to be considered a moral acknowledgment of the human ingenuity, time, and skill involved in the creation of a work rather than simply a legal fiction. The courts in both England and the United States often followed this Lockean view by giving copyright the status of a right as much as a property privilege. In this respect, the concept of labor as one of the prime sources of copyright law goes back to the time of John Locke.
