[HN Gopher] AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. co...
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AI-generated art lacks copyright protection, D.C. court says
Author : kordlessagain
Score : 149 points
Date : 2023-08-19 13:51 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.bloomberglaw.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.bloomberglaw.com)
| gabereiser wrote:
| "Absent any human involvement" - so open it in photoshop, add
| your signature, done. It was created by you, the computer
| scientist, with the aide of a computer program (like photoshop
| :D). IANAL. YMMV. See ruling for details.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Bloomberg tries to get the reader to enable Javascript in order
| to download a PDF. Not necessary. Here is the opinion. No
| Javascript required.
|
| https://ia601401.us.archive.org/14/items/gov.uscourts.dcd.24...
| [deleted]
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's so weird how much we rent in courts to make up laws based on
| their opinions of laws and precedence. It's fine in a lunch but
| it's really an indication congress needs to make laws. And courts
| determine if they are constitutional.
|
| This has been a problem for 75+ years. Courts just making de
| facto law. It's not their role.
| rcarr wrote:
| Here's an interesting question:
|
| Corridor Digital are getting closer to perfecting AI anime. After
| the first video, Rock Paper Scissors, they said they got some
| flak for training the AI on stills from an existing anime movie,
| so for the second one they hired an artist and trained it from
| their drawings. Well, what happens if you hire an artist that
| essentially draws some art work heavily inspired by an existing
| IP and then you train your AI model on that? Is that
| infringement, even though the art work you've trained the AI on
| is now one step removed from official source material, even if it
| is practically identical? What if you commission another artist
| to make artwork based on that artwork? And another after that?
| When does the signal get distorted enough to pass as not being
| based on pre-existing IP?
|
| The whole thing feels like the "grain of sand" philosophy
| problem. What constitutes enough change to warrant something as
| not belonging to an IP anymore? Are we going to have to come up
| with some sort of image comparison algorithm that spits out a
| comparison percentage and set some arbitrary number as the cut
| off point? Or are we going to continue with time consuming and
| costly case by case, human judged comparisons?
|
| The whole thing feels ridiculous.
| Takennickname wrote:
| How would you even prove that
| andsoitis wrote:
| Artists typically attribute their work. Artists are generally
| unlikely to pretend work generated by AI is their own, because
| their reputation will be damaged.
| simonh wrote:
| A lot of the people using AI art generators are not
| themselves artists, but how do you prove they aren't?.
| andsoitis wrote:
| It is up to them to prove originality/provenance if they
| want to enforce copyright.
| brookst wrote:
| Burden of proof goes the other way. If someone copyrights
| AI art, you copy it, and they sue you... it's going to be
| on you to prove it was _not_ original.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > If someone copyrights AI art
|
| They would be risking contravening the law. Probably not
| worth it.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think it's criminal to copyright something that's
| not eligible. The copyright office should turn it down,
| and it would lose if challenged, but I don't think it's
| illegal to file the claim. I'd welcome info to the
| contrary.
| GaggiX wrote:
| That would make sense if there is an actual way to
| enforce the law, the entire conversation is about how to
| prove that a bad actor is violating copyright law by
| copyrighting AI art.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Your posts here are very naive. Scamming is widespread,
| and there are no legal penalties (other than the loss of
| the filing fee) for false claims of authorship. The only
| risk to an AI-powered scammer is if they go to the
| expense of suing someone else for copyright infringement,
| which they probably won't since scammers like easy money.
| And there is a lot of easy money to be made, so this is
| going to keep happening.
|
| Last week there was a book about the Maui fires in the
| top 100 on Amazon, which looks to have been written
| entirely by ChatGPT: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroe
| loffs/2023/08/17/amazon-...
| freejazz wrote:
| To sue, you first have to register your work with the
| copyright office.
| another-dave wrote:
| I'm not clear on what the status of the piece is after the
| ruling.
|
| As in, let's say I got AI to generate a cartoon character
| preparatory sketch in black penline.
|
| If I printed that out and used it as a reference to do a "clean
| room implementation" of the character -- do I now own the
| copyright, since I'm the first person to produce a copyright-
| eligible rendition of that likeness?
|
| Or since it's a copy of an uncopyrightable work is the character
| immediately in the public domain, as if it was generated by a
| human & then given a really permissive license?
| f33d5173 wrote:
| > Thaler's motion for summary judgment, which Howell denied in
| the Friday order, argued that permitting AI to be listed as an
| author on copyrighted works would incentivize more creation,
| which is in line with copyright law's purpose of promoting useful
| art for the public.
|
| Lel.
|
| Its wholly a semantic game. If you say "this machine created this
| artwork _wink_ _wink_ " the court will deny you because "machines
| can't have copyright". If you say "I created this artwork, using
| aid from a computer program" they'll likely let you do just about
| anything.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The court actually said AIs can't be authors under copyright law,
| it takes no stand (becauae the question was not before it) on
| whether and, if so, in what conditions AI-generated art can be
| copyrighted by the human using the AI to generate it.
| gumballindie wrote:
| Cool beans, hope this covers code too, and once source code leaks
| from companies that use AI then we can all use it to...you know
| "train" our ais.
| awestroke wrote:
| Oh but I created all these artworks myself your honor
| dale_glass wrote:
| Sure, because judges are stupid. This kind of thing has been in
| court before.
|
| If I recall there was some case in which the authorship of some
| picture was contested, and the judge asked the people involved
| to draw something right there, in court.
|
| So the same thing would happen. They'd ask you "okay, so how
| did you draw it? What tools do your use? Can you show us
| sketches? Can you draw something here, right now?"
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Yes, m'Lud. My "brush and palette" are this laptop. <types-in
| prompt>
|
| My "paint" is software, m'Lud. Some of it is pre-made "paint"
| that someone else wrote, like tubes of paint from an art-
| shop; some of it is my own modifications, analogous to
| grinding your own pigments.
| bartchamdo wrote:
| Fantasyland as the idea of copyright starts to crack. Wait till
| AI starts inventing things and attempts to patent them.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| What incentive would it have to patent something it invented?
| gene-h wrote:
| Why wouldn't operators of algorithms that produce novel
| inventions attempt to patent their output or even automate
| the process so that the patenting occurs with little to no
| human intervention?
|
| I'd argue we aren't very far from this point. Computers have
| already been used to make novel inventions. I think we could
| see an explosion in computer generated inventions if physical
| reasoning, reasoning about how objects move with respect to
| each other, continues to improve. Previously used approaches,
| such as genetic algorithms, have difficulty solving problems
| like inventing a new type of lock or clock escapement which
| require multiple moving parts.
| p1mrx wrote:
| Money can be exchanged for goods and services.
| sgc wrote:
| Why wouldn't the AI creator program it to do that, for
| personal gain? If there is value, somebody will try to
| extract it.
| megamix wrote:
| Do you agree AI generated art is theft in the first place?
| thrill wrote:
| Previous rulings had found that when code itself was copyrighted
| due to being a work of art (of human labor), the output of that
| code was indeed copyrightable if the program did the majority of
| the work in producing that output. This ruling seems at odds with
| that previous interpretation.
|
| https://mwhlawgroup.com/can-copyright-in-software-extend-to-...
| space_fountain wrote:
| Here the programmer was trying to make a point that AIs deserve
| to be marked as authors. I think this ruling is much less broad
| then the article is implying. Presumably an argument that the
| programmer deserved the copyright in deference to the creative
| work used to make the algorithm or that the AI is just a tool
| like photoshop or a camera might have worked, but the filer
| here wasn't interested in that line of thinking and wanted to
| open up copyright to machines
| __loam wrote:
| It's good that he failed. AI personhood is a ridiculous can
| of worms that we should avoid for as long as we can. Just
| look at the disaster that is corporate personhood.
| brookst wrote:
| Are weights code?
| geertj wrote:
| Why couldn't they be?
|
| Using a Godel like encoding every program is also a number.
| So it seems that numbers that are complex enough that they
| are isomorphic to a copyrightable program should be
| copyrightable. I tend to think of the neural net weights as a
| different instruction set, just how Intel and ARM are also
| different instruction sets.
|
| I fully well realize that lawmakers and the judiciary will be
| the final arbiter here (although I hope some logic will be
| part of the process).
| regularfry wrote:
| Yes, for a rather odd VM.
| jrajav wrote:
| No, weights are data, just like transformation matrices used
| by graphics code. The data has no meaning without the code,
| and the code is what creates and manages it based on its
| inputs, as an aid to generating some output. So it's
| perfectly accurate to talk about the code as the main (or
| only) actual mechanism.
| halfcat wrote:
| The distinction that data has no meaning without code is
| unconvincing.
|
| The code has no meaning without a compiler or interpreter.
|
| The compiler and interpreter have no meaning without a CPU.
|
| If I store x86 CPU instructions in a Postgres database, is
| that data or code?
|
| It's also a worth viewing this in light of different
| computing models. The main mechanism may look quite
| different if you're looking at a CPU, GPU, or DSP model of
| computing.
| somesoftdev wrote:
| I believe code holds meaning even without a compiler or
| interpreter. I can read code and discern its
| functionality. I can even recognize existing algorithms
| such as quicksort. I can achieve the same understanding
| with pseudocode, which lacks an existing compiler.
| Similarly, prompts possess meaning; I can comprehend the
| task delegated to a machine learning model by reading the
| prompt.
|
| I agree that both code and data are akin in terms of
| meaning. Transitioning from Assembly language to Python
| liberates us from concerns about registers and low-level
| intricacies. Python directs our attention to the problems
| we aim to solve, in contrast to low-level languages where
| a significant effort is spent on specifying hardware
| operations. High-level languages emphasize outcomes,
| enabling us to focus on the result rather than
| meticulously instructing the hardware. AI propels us
| further along this trajectory.
|
| In this sense, I view a prompt and code as rather
| similar.
| oneshtein wrote:
| Transformation matrices are code. They are instructions how
| to transform something into something else.
|
| However, code is just data for a compiler.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| It is not, the filer here claimed no role in the creation
| except as the employer of the AI in a work for hire, and was
| attempting to overturn the Registrar of Copyrights
| determination that AI could not be an author and that a
| registration listing the AI as the author was facially invalid.
|
| This case is fundamentally _not_ about whether art in which AI
| is used as a tool by a human (even if the human role is
| entirely in programming the AI) is copyrightable as a work of
| the human, it is solely about whether a piece of software can
| be an author under copyright law, a _very_ different question.
| yjk wrote:
| From the link: 'It was suggested that copyright protection
| afforded to the computer program may also extend to the output
| files if the program does the "lion's share of the work" in
| creating the output files and the user's input is "marginal."'
|
| Even if you consider the user input to be marginal, the issue
| from the link is the copyright of the program extending to the
| code, not that of the user.
| nerdponx wrote:
| That's a fascinating ruling.
|
| Forget AI for a minute. Let's say I write a program to generate
| cool images using Penrose tiles or space filling curves or some
| other algorithmic process, maybe deterministic, maybe
| (pseudo-)random. Under that ruling, it sounds like all of the
| outputs of my program would also fall under the copyright of
| the original program, unless the creator could prove that they
| did substantial work in addition to what the program did.
|
| Which then leads to the next question of: what is the "lion's
| share"? Does it matter if I randomly punch in some parameters
| and get a nice result on the first try, or if I spend hours
| trying different parameter combinations to find some thing that
| looks the way I want it to? Even if the outcome is still
| considered owned by the software author, is my particular
| parameter choice copyrightable by me, being my own creative
| output?
|
| If you think about it, the modern generative "AI" systems are
| more or less the same thing, but where the input parameter
| space is something like the entire space of written language,
| rather than a couple drop-down menus with algorithm settings
| and a seed for a PRNG. Does it matter if I slap in a simple
| prompt and get a nice result, or if I spent hours engineering a
| perfect prompt?
|
| If anything, it should be unambiguous that the prompts are
| copyrightable just like any other written work, being actual
| free-form human-readable text. So at least AI artists have that
| going for them.
|
| It will be really interesting to see what happens as more court
| rulings unfold.
| sircastor wrote:
| Suppose I manufacture a compass or a protractor that you use
| to make beautiful curves in your art - surely my effort is
| greater than yours. You cannot create an accurate arc without
| my tool. Surely I deserve the lion's share of credit and
| profit. Incidentally, my friend the paintbrush maker would
| like to speak with you.
|
| I'm being facetious of course. I suspect this technology is
| going to rapidly push us into radically rethinking how
| copyright works, but it'll be delayed some 20-30 years by
| incumbents desperately clinging to their hordes of existing
| IP.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Well, we have a bunch of issues, here.
|
| First, there's a bunch of (non-creative) people that just
| want free creative assets. They don't like it, when
| creatives insist on being paid for the [considerable] time,
| effort, education and experience that goes into the
| creative asset.
|
| Those people are jumping for joy.
|
| Then, we have the creatives, themselves, who may have
| attended the correct schools, and have the appropriate
| education, to produce quality assets. They don't want
| people to just take their work. This looks like a side-
| jacking. If someone sees a nice picture that was done by a
| creative, then they can prompt MidJourney to produce one
| that looks a lot like it, for the cost of the MJ
| subscription. They don't particularly care (yet)[0] about
| copyright.
|
| Then, we have the portfolio holders, who are often not
| creatives, but still hold the copyrights on a lot of
| creative work. Think Disney, or Universal. Their portfolios
| are an investment. They don't want to lose that investment.
|
| Then, we have the crooks, who want to make cheap, crappy
| copies of creative assets, regardless of who owns the
| copyright. At the moment, there is an element of risk, as
| they could get caught and punished.
|
| They are also jumping for joy.
|
| [0] I said "yet," because one of the problems with a "wild
| west" copyright and trademark atmosphere, is that it is
| extremely easy to make "almost-like" copies, and if you
| don't protect your IP (or can't), then it is "up for
| grabs."
|
| This is done now, but it's illegal, and can be stopped;
| especially if trademark is involved. I was at a Chinese
| restaurant, once, and was listening to the music. I noticed
| that there were many strains of hugely popular (and
| copyrighted) songs, like Scarborough Fair, and Moondance,
| all mashed together into a continuous stream. The owner
| confirmed what I suspected. He subscribed to a service that
| sends legal "muzak" to his restaurant. He had been mugged
| by ASCAP, once, and never wanted to go through that again.
|
| I've noticed that "free everything" people often insist
| that everything _except their own work_ should be "freed."
| ajdude wrote:
| In the latest episode of the Adam Regusio podcast [1], Adam
| was speculating that a nonprofit organization could create a
| program that generates every single possible melody or chord
| progression in order to release it with a creative Commons
| license. The idea was that record labels have been suing
| artists who create similar chord progressions recently to
| songs from 50 years ago and that he could and the madness.
|
| perhaps that ruling could be justification.
|
| [1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=WE9ibS_6WdY
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Somebody already did this:
|
| https://www.openculture.com/2020/03/every-melody-has-been-
| co...
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Previous rulings had found that when code itself was
| copyrighted due to being a work of art (of human labor)
|
| Traditionally code would be written as a tool to achieve a
| specific output. If you automate the task of generating a
| particular piece of code, you still did all the work, or at
| least defined it pprecisely. While I don't see AI as an
| independent mind (yet) it seems independent enough from the
| person who prompts it to say the prompter doesn't own the
| output. I'm so 100 percent on what I just wrote, but it seems
| reasonable enough to say the precedent you mention may not
| apply.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm pretty sure if the output of the code could be seen as
| deterministic, that is to say the code just makes what will
| be produced 1000 times quicker, then the work would be
| copyrightable but if the output is not deterministic then we
| cannot say to whom the copyright should belong.
| randombits0 wrote:
| Only creative expressions are copyrightable. Purely
| functional expressions are not.
| cma wrote:
| What if you roll dice in making choices in a traditional
| work?
| regularfry wrote:
| Different area of law, but I'm pretty sure computer generated
| ideas have been patented before now.
| layer8 wrote:
| With LLMs, arguably the code is much less decisive for the
| specific output than the model, which is data. An interesting
| question to ask is which human labor contributed to the model.
| The training data probably would constitute a significant share
| in that.
| TrueDuality wrote:
| The code here isn't producing a specific, designed, or planned
| output. It is effectively doing refined data analysis and
| interpretation of an intermediate format (the weights) that is
| exclusively dependent on its input data not on the code itself.
|
| I don't see any inconsistency in this ruling.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| seydor wrote:
| But did they ask Disney?
| GaggiX wrote:
| This seems to work only with people that will admin and probably
| promote their works as AI generated, other people will probably
| argue how the image or text was actually modified enough by the
| human to grant him the copyright.
|
| Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is so
| different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one
| clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is
| so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one
| clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
|
| In the case of a camera, you know how the pohotgraph will turn
| out. You set and positioned the camera in a specific, creative
| way to ensure that composition.
|
| In the case of an AI, it's not the paintbrush, it's the
| painter. The prompts serve less as arms to a brush and more as
| instructions to a commissioned artist.
| GaggiX wrote:
| >you know how the pohotgraph will turn out
|
| So if I stick out the camera from a corner then I don't own
| the copyright because I don't know how the photograph will
| turn out, if that's not case then I should own the copyright
| of an AI generated image because in both cases I have an
| approximate understanding of what the image would be.
| danShumway wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality#
| Pre-p...
|
| TLDR it's untested in United States court, but yes, the
| same principles apply. You very well might not own the
| copyright on that street-corner photo.
|
| There is no way of getting around the human authorship and
| creativity requirement. There's no loophole that AI can
| sneak though. If AI output does become copyrightable, it
| will only be because of arguments that the controlling of
| that AI is sufficiently creative and deliberate to pass the
| minimum threshold required by law and the outcome isn't a
| random or uncontrolled result. Saying that it's "just like
| pressing buttons on a camera" does you no favors, if
| photography was just pressing a button then it wouldn't be
| copyrightable.
|
| And in fact, there was an 1884 Supreme Court challenge over
| photography copyright that was predicated exactly on the
| argument that photography was a purely mechanical
| reconstruction of an existing scene
| (https://blogs.loc.gov/copyright/2020/09/historic-court-
| cases...). The argument was rejected not because purely
| mechanical reconstructions are copyrightable, but because
| the court disagreed and said that photography was both an
| act of human creativity and that it had a controlled
| outcome, similar to "writing" or "engraving".
|
| And note that a critical component of "writing" or
| "engraving" is intent and control. When you write down
| something on a page, you get the result that you intended
| to put on the page; you control the "words" that appear. An
| important question when discussing AI copyright is what the
| threshold is where we can say that use is actually
| controlling the AI. A vague prompt might not qualify, an
| extremely specific prompt that is itself a creative
| expression might? A more guided process might? (although
| it's not certain if this would cover the resulting image or
| just the prompt itself). This is all untested in current
| law.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| With AI, you control the idea but you have no understanding
| of the creative expression that will result from entering a
| prompt.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| With the simplest, one-shot, prompt-only workflow, sure,
| that might be a reasonable approximation of the truth.
| minimaxir wrote:
| With _just_ a text prompt, no. But there are an
| increasing number of ways to use human decision-making to
| strongly and evidently control the outputs (LoRAs,
| ControlNet, Img2Img) that haven 't been legally tested
| yet.
| [deleted]
| lowdest wrote:
| This applies only to under-specified prompting. I usually
| go in with a finished image in mind, and use very long
| prompts and inpainting to make it real. It can take
| dozens of images to get the prompt to reflect what I have
| in mind, then several more iterations to polish it. While
| I can technically produce several images per minute, I
| usually spend about 30 minutes to 1 hour to get the
| output I want, and more if it's going to be an extra
| large or complicated piece.
|
| This is very much like the "is electronic music real
| music?" debates when people can quickly throw together
| some presets and hit play.
| mackek2 wrote:
| You have copyright ownership of the work you produced,
| the prompt (under specified or not really), but not the
| output of the model.
| __loam wrote:
| The labor involved is also a lot hairier. With the camera,
| all the effort put into designing it and manufacturing it had
| an intended end of a photographer taking pictures. That is
| the explicit goal. AI is entirely reliant on labor used
| without consent.
| dale_glass wrote:
| AI is interesting because sometimes it's the paintbrush,
| sometimes not, and it's very hard for people to tell at a
| glance.
|
| Right now there's thing like ControlNet which allows you to
| draw a skeleton for the AI to follow. There are plugins that
| provide masking. You can draw stuff on top of an existing
| image. You can draw a sketch for the AI to follow. You can
| fix details in post.
|
| So there's a multitude of possibilities available.
|
| The interesting thing is that unless you are involved in the
| scene it's very hard to tell what took the user a lot of
| work, guidance and retouching to generate, and what popped
| out just like that.
|
| Example:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZtoBSDUdEk
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiG_v61cLxI
| Kuinox wrote:
| When prompting an image with AI, it's commong to lay basics
| things then keep adding things so it looks like your desired
| outcome. There can be good unexpected surprise, but most of
| the time you guide it to the wanted result.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Also I don't understand why pressing a button on a camera is
| so different than writing a prompt and pressing a button, one
| clearly grants you human authorship the other is disputed.
|
| This case was analogous to claiming the camera as the author,
| and the photographer as a copyright owner only because the
| camera did the work as a work for hire.
|
| Which would also fail.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _Also I don 't understand why pressing a button on a camera is
| so different_
|
| Take any good digital came, switch it on, and press the button.
| Do you get a great photograph? No, because you haven't even
| removed the lens cap. Photography is not about pressing the
| button, it's about where you point the camera and how you
| configure it before you push the button.
| addisonl wrote:
| I mean these analogies could be applied to AI image gen too.
| Open up an image gen tool and press generate. Do you get a
| great image? No, because you didn't even enter a prompt.
| machdiamonds wrote:
| Generating AI art can get as complex as you want:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/14ye2eg/co.
| ..
|
| https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI
| LexGray wrote:
| Once you hit the shutter button you do get a great photograph
| due to all the machine learning and other post processing the
| photo is exposed to.
|
| I could see an argument that a heavily augmented normal photo
| is not much different from a photo generated from a prompt.
| Digital zoom is virtually AI inpainting where it guesses the
| detail.
| GaggiX wrote:
| It doesn't matter where you point the camera to own the
| copyright unless you're violating other laws like privacy
| laws I would imagine.
| regularfry wrote:
| Ownership of copyright isn't the question. Existence of it
| is.
| GaggiX wrote:
| Okay and we can agree that with photography copyright
| exists even if it just requires the press of button.
| tedajax wrote:
| Because the "generated" art is more accurately described as
| "stolen".
| GaggiX wrote:
| There is nothing accurate about describe it as "stolen", no
| one is depriving you of your art when training a model, like
| no human is depriving you of your art when learning from it.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| While I wouldn't describe AI art as stolen I do think it's
| fair to claim there has been a loss of potential earning
| from the creative work that went into developing a style
| and the marketing that went into evangelizing/popularizing
| it.
| johngladtj wrote:
| The same applies when another human does it
| tester457 wrote:
| Great difference in scale, humans cannot automate at
| nearly the level machines can. The law will have to
| account for this.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Step one: Take a piece of AI-generated art.
|
| Step two: Very slightly modify it. (Visual art: Apply a color
| filter, draw in a single element, have a different AI change some
| details, etc. Music: Subtly change the tempo or add one minor
| audio effect.)
|
| Step three: Copyright the work as something "made by a human with
| AI assistance."
|
| If challenged, step four: Claim that humans have been making
| works of art with all available technical means from the dawn of
| civilization, and that to draw an arbitrary line in the sand at
| assisted generation is unprincipled.
|
| And, basically, lmao at the courts, as usual.
| randyrand wrote:
| Even easier, use a physical camera and take a very good photo
| of your laptop screen. You'll own the copyright of the
| photograph.
| skybrian wrote:
| They'll likely just decide it's not different enough. Courts
| aren't computers; they can look at intent.
|
| A classic essay:
|
| What colour are your bits? https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
| nerdponx wrote:
| The recent Warhol Foundation vs Goldsmith ruling should make
| this clear. Warhol basically did just put some color filters
| on a photo by Goldsmith, and the Supreme Court ruled that no,
| that's not allowed, it's not transformative enough to be fair
| use, that's still Goldsmith's photo.
| zuminator wrote:
| That particular ruling was able to be made because the
| original work was available to make a comparison with.
| However, it's well established in the US that the author of
| an adaptive work is generally entitled to copyright over
| the modified portions.[0] So a work merely has to be
| presented as an human-authored adaptation of an AI
| template.
|
| [0] https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| brookst wrote:
| > unprincipled
|
| > lmao at the courts
|
| I see this a lot on HN: the idea that courts rule based on
| principles. It's a strange viewpoint. There are courts _of
| law_. They rule based on law. To the extent law is messy (it
| is), court rulings will be messy.
|
| There isn't a court in the world that would make a ruling based
| on your, my, or anyone else's principles.
| asu_thomas wrote:
| > _I see this a lot on HN_
|
| It goes right along with the belief that capitalism is a
| naturalistic ideal, as opposed to a temporary state of
| societal organization maintained for the benefit of a few
| people.
|
| Also, for the reasons you give, copyright itself is devoid of
| principled logic.
| __loam wrote:
| Until capitalism collapses, which is inevitable if we
| believe Marx's thoughts on the matter, copyright is an
| important way to protect and pay people who make things so
| they don't starve.
| nfoz wrote:
| What? Capitalism is just fine without the artificial
| notion of copyright.
|
| We can pay labourers for their time producing works. We
| don't _need_ pay-per-copy.
| astrange wrote:
| Artists tend to be very upset when they make a work for
| hire, it gets popular decades later, and they don't get
| any royalties.
| __loam wrote:
| Big reason why the writer's guild is currently on strike.
| Super naive view that people who make stuff shouldn't
| continue to be compensated if someone is getting value
| from that work. That's part of why programming can be so
| lucrative.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Do you honestly believe that legal thinkers haven't been
| dealing with these types of arguments and problems for
| centuries?
|
| I mean really. Do you think you're proposing an original idea
| here?
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The court can rule that you have copyright only on the
| modifications you did, and if someone can extract the
| underlying AI-generated picture, they can freely use it.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| > if someone can extract the underlying AI-generated picture,
| they can freely use it.
|
| If the AI generated portion exists nowhere else, and if it's
| not _obviously_ an AI-generated work, how would a court know
| what's generated and what's been modified?
| __loam wrote:
| It's fun to see people who are unfamiliar with the
| discovery process in law.
| [deleted]
| __loam wrote:
| My understanding of how this works is that you own a copyright
| on the modifications to the original image, but not on the
| original work produced by the AI. The way you're explaining it
| isn't consistent with how the law may actually be applied.
| simonw wrote:
| Has anyone got a good answer to the question of "how much" human
| intervention is needed for AI-generated works to be copyrighted?
|
| I type "a racoon wearing a hat" as a prompt and get back an
| image. It sounds like that's not copyrightable.
|
| How about if I type that into Photoshop generative art, and then
| apply some filters?
|
| Or how about I run that, and then "a walrus with a bowtie", and
| then "a platypus on a skateboard", and then arrange those three
| images together on a page?
|
| What about if I spend literally hours prompting, and re-
| prompting, and combining, and layering, and cropping until I get
| the result I'm looking for?
|
| These feel like important questions to me. Has anyone tested
| these in a court of law yet?
| space_fountain wrote:
| The headline doesn't seem to be what actually happened. The filer
| was arguing that the ai created the work on its own as a work for
| hire and thus the ai was the author with the computer scientist
| merely being the owner of the copyright as it was made for hire.
| I don't think the argument that ai is a tool and the human
| operating it is the author was considered because the filer
| explicitly didn't want to consider it.
|
| In the review being appealed here
| (https://www.copyright.gov/rulings-filings/review-
| board/docs/...). It makes it clear that the computer scientist
| doing the filing was trying to argue this was a work made for
| hire with the author being the computer. They wanted to argue
| that copyright can be assigned to non humans, but that just isn't
| how the law works. The summary makes it clear early that it's
| just taking their word that the work had no human input and was
| thus purely the creation of the computer. This seems to be a a
| better article https://www.millernash.com/industry-news/paradise-
| denied-cop....
| toast0 wrote:
| > They wanted to argue that copyright can be assigned to non
| humans, but that just isn't how the law works.
|
| Just a nitpick that this isn't really about copyright
| _assignment_ , it's about rights that arise as a result of a
| eligible work by a eligible author being fixed into a tangible
| medium. These rights aren't assigned to the author, they come
| into being automatically.
|
| In this case, the ruling seems to be that there was no eligible
| author, and as such, no rights came into being. Or at least,
| the claimed author is not an eligible author: had the claim
| been that the human was the author, using the AI as a
| paintbrush, that would be a different question.
|
| It would be another matter if a natural person authored a work
| and wished to assign its rights to a non-person. Which yeah,
| you pretty much can't do. Under most legal frameworks,
| ownership is for people, natural or corporate; anything that's
| not a people is property and property can't own property.
| layer8 wrote:
| This seems to be consistent with the Copyright Registration
| Guidance for Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial
| Intelligence [0] previously discussed on HN [1].
|
| [0]
| https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35191206
| briandw wrote:
| This ruling is consistent IMO with the Monkey Takes a Selfie
| ruling
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
| randyrand wrote:
| I've always found that ruling so bad. Who pushes the button is
| the least important part of photography and can be easily
| automated. It's choosing the subject matter, getting the camera
| to that location, angles, exposure, lenses, and taking the time
| to do it all that is the creative part.
|
| For the sake of argument, if a camera had 5 years of storage
| and battery life and was left running from the factory, should
| canon own everything it produced? Is pushing the shutter button
| really the most important question?
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