[HN Gopher] US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be co...
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US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted
Author : rvz
Score : 367 points
Date : 2025-03-18 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Because many of the Copyright Act's provisions make sense only
| if an author is a human being, the best reading of the Copyright
| Act is that human authorship is required for registration
|
| This is going to be a very selective judgment.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| As all interpretations of law are. That's why there's the
| profession of lawyer and they make very good money if they can
| convince a judge and jury of their interpretation of the law.
|
| As a software engineer I see the dangers of such an inexact
| system. Where we can put people in jail for the rest of their
| lives or let others go free just because there's so much gray
| area in the interpretation of the law.
| capital_guy wrote:
| This is a point of hubris I see among SWEs very frequently,
| for some reason. People like to think they could make a
| better system, one that's black and white. The truth is the
| use of judgement and context is essential to a good legal
| system.
| yifanl wrote:
| The inexactness of law is what makes it possible to extend it
| to novel situations like this. We don't live at the end of
| history.
| vharuck wrote:
| Exact systems that put people in jail would be much more
| terrifying, because they'd achieve simplicity by ignoring
| complexity. The existence of the state and federal supreme
| courts in the US shows the need for careful consideration of
| how laws interact with one another and an ever-changing
| world.
| dave4420 wrote:
| As a software engineer I see the dangers of a nominally
| exhaustively-specified system. Where people would spend their
| lives in jail or go free depending on whether a majority of
| legislators had considered that particular edge case.
|
| It's better than judges have some discretion.
| j_w wrote:
| It may not be you doing the work to generate it, but if you are
| distributing illegal content that is still illegal no matter
| how you generated it.
| delusional wrote:
| That is not what the ruling says
|
| Two quotes from the judgement
|
| > On the application, Dr. Thaler listed the Creativity Machine
| as the work's sole author and himself as just the work's owner.
|
| and
|
| > Nor do we reach Dr. Thaler's argument that he is the work's
| author by virtue of making and using the Creativity Machine
| because that argument was waived before the agency.
|
| Make it very clear that this is NOT an opinion on if a human
| being can be said to be the author of a work that they used an
| AI to generate. Dr. Thaler listed the machine itself as the
| author on the original application, and has therefore conceded
| that he is not the author. The courts cannot concluded that he
| filled out the form in error, and must accept the facts as
| given. This judgment says that if you decide that the machine
| is the author, then you can't claim copyright. It says nothing
| about what happens if you claim that you are the author.
|
| This would of course not carry over when we talk about
| liability, since the defendant doesn't get to decide what the
| claim is in those cases.
| elmerfud wrote:
| No that is not the logical take that is an extremely illogical
| extension of what was said. What was upheld was narrowly
| tailored in regards to copyright protections.
|
| If you're saying that the AI created deep fake cannot be
| copyrighted well then you would be in line with what the court
| said. If you are saying that there is a logical extension that
| a machine created something at the behest of a human that that
| human cannot be held responsible for the creation, that is not
| what is being said at all. As a matter of fact there is a long
| history of things and not being able to be copyrighted but
| people can still be held criminally liable for.
| tehjoker wrote:
| interesting, i bet AI assisted art is copyrightable though (i.e.
| have AI do the "boring" parts and have the human do the
| interesting parts)
|
| here's one way I think that could be helpful. I read an interview
| with the final fantasy 6 director where he said doing a final
| fantasy 6 remake would probably take 20 years because the amount
| of content (and various art decisions) would take so much longer
| to make under today's expectations.
|
| I wonder if projects like that would be closer to possible if
| artists could get AI to do maybe 10-20% of the work for them,
| like a 1st pass at background scenery or a 3d model or something
| or fixing a small flaws in motion capture
|
| that said, i sympathize with the artists because i want to
| control every penstroke and every keystroke, maybe AI assisted
| art is a more difficult problem than it sounds. most likely AI
| assisted art will look less like prompting and more like advanced
| photoshop tools (like take this line sketch + a prompt and rough
| shade it for me).
| wildzzz wrote:
| I'm guessing it's something like 80% of the tasks only take 20%
| of the time. I'm sure AI generated textures could speed some of
| the development work up but I'm sure the majority of the work
| would still involve the small adjustments and tuning of the
| models. AI gets the gist right but the devil is in the details
| so designers may end up spending more time fixing what's wrong
| versus just doing it the traditional way.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Maybe it would be more useful in adding a different kind
| variation to proceduraly generated content, but on the other
| hand, when you don't precisely know what you're going to get,
| it's hard to reason about how it will be used.
|
| i could kind of see some potential in something like based on
| the different kinds of choices a player makes in the game, it
| could generate different portraits or character designs, but
| you can also do that with a large library of human art or
| with art with modular pieces.
|
| the thing AI can do is create something custom and
| individualized for a player, but on the other hand, by being
| too personalized, you destroy commonalities in the game that
| people can appreciate together.
| sophrocyne wrote:
| It is.
|
| https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
| kristopolous wrote:
| "affirmed that a work of art generated by artificial intelligence
| without human input cannot be copyrighted under U.S. law"
|
| Does that exist?
|
| What would that even be? A "random2image" model?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The plaintiff is asserting it exists. He could easily resolve
| the issue by listing himself, not the AI, as the creator of the
| work, but he's pushing the point to concretize it into law.
| kopecs wrote:
| As a matter of law? Sure it does. Thaler said the image at
| issue was "autonomously created by a computer algorithm running
| on a machine". He's been trying to walk that back for the last
| couple of years though. See _Thaler v. Perlmutter_ ,
| 1:22-cv01564-BAH (ECF #24), D.D.C. (Aug. 18, 2023).
| visarga wrote:
| How about selection? If I select the good image from 1000
| others? Curation is also a contribution to art.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| I would say curation and editing are much more important
| than creating the art itself, but that might be a very
| unpopular opinion.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| [delayed]
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The argument about whether human selection would make the
| human the author of the work is irrelevant, because the
| human in this case isn't claiming authorship, by selection
| or otherwise.
| hackingonempty wrote:
| It's called "unconditional generation" so yes you supply a
| random input string and it generates something. StyleGAN2 is an
| unconditional image generation model. StyleGAN2 trained on
| faces from Flickr: https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
| andix wrote:
| I understand it in this way (I am not a lawyer): if you're
| using an AI tool to generate art, the company that's running
| the AI tool as SaaS can't claim copyright on the generated
| content. The person who uses the tool can claim copyright, as
| they created the content with a tool (AI). Comparable to a
| brush (=tool) for painting.
| deepsun wrote:
| I wonder if I supply a random input to a fine-tuned model that
| can only generate what I wanted initially.
|
| I.e. the model named "starry-night-van-gough-with-bunny" can
| generate only one image.
| andix wrote:
| If you want to know if this would be copyrightable, just flip
| a coin. I don't think anyone can give you better legal advice
| on this example than a coin toss.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| In this particular instance, the claim was filled out that way.
| slavik81 wrote:
| It's not a necessary test for this case, but in general I would
| suggest using a legal test that is AI agnostic. Imagine there
| is a service where you can submit a prompt and get an image in
| return. You might submit a prompt like, "a man in steampunk
| gear sitting at a table playing with poker chips".
|
| If a human artist draws an image based on that prompt, do you
| share joint copyright between the two of you? Or, does the
| artist have full copyright over the image they drew?
|
| If your contribution was insufficient for joint copyright in
| the case of the human artist, then it was also insufficient to
| grant you copyright in the case of the AI artist. To know
| whether you have a claim on the copyright of the resulting
| image, you only need to look at your own creative inputs.
|
| I am not a lawyer, but that is my expectation of where this
| will ultimately end up.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Does that exist?
|
| Yes, for the purposes of this case, because that that is an
| accurate description of the image in this case is not a fact in
| dispute between the two sides. This is a case about what the
| law means _given_ that uncontroversial (between the parties)
| fact.
| anticristi wrote:
| These judges are going to be in serious trouble once AI turns
| against us. #AIRights
| luqtas wrote:
| i think you'll be in great trouble by gossiping about the AI
| takeover /s
| flowerthoughts wrote:
| So are distillation models copyrightable?
|
| Can't wait until models generate models and we are finally free
| of the copyright and software patent troll extorsion rackets.
| ronsor wrote:
| There's a fair chance models of any kind are not copyrightable.
| bogwog wrote:
| I think that's a good ruling.
|
| Say I create a website that just sells AI generated logos. I set
| up some automation so I'm constantly generating millions of logos
| per day.
|
| I also have a bot that scrapes the web to try and find anyone
| using a logo similar to the ones on my website, and then send
| legal threats demanding payment for copying my artwork.
|
| I'm sure more imaginative scammers will find a way to copyright
| troll using AI.
| kopecs wrote:
| I don't think it takes that much imagination here. Not sure
| what good the first step is actually doing you. Might as well
| just AI-generate your racketeering demand letters without doing
| that part.
| bogwog wrote:
| If I just send fake letters, it's illegal (I assume). If I
| have a legitimate website selling logos, and point to the
| product page for the logo I accused you of copying, _and_ I
| can claim copyright ownership over AI generated art, then I
| have the law on my side even if I get taken to court (I
| assume).
|
| I'm not a lawyer though, so I'm probably wrong. At the very
| least, the legitimate website makes the threatening letter
| look more believable.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| This is doing it the long way round. Just set up a website that
| generates every combination of pixels as you scroll down it.
|
| Or just scrape logos, barely change them, and publish them and
| threaten legal action.
| bogwog wrote:
| I like this idea. It's like the library of babel
| (https://libraryofbabel.info), but for logos.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Just set up a website that generates every combination of
| pixels as you scroll down it.
|
| Sure. I guess when it finishes your great great grand-
| children (I might be very generous here too) can deal with
| the fallout of such a brute force algorithm.
| regulation_d wrote:
| Copyright law: A reason that copyright trolls are less common
| than patent trolls is that under copyright law, works created
| independently are not infringing. In court, you might have to
| prove that you did actually create the thing independently, but
| I think most juries would be sympathetic to this case. "Oh, you
| think that the defendant combed through your giant library of
| millions of logos to find this one specific, rather simple
| looking specimen."
|
| Also, a lot of logos are simply not "artistic" enough to be
| eligible for copyright. So in general, logos are more likely to
| be the subject of trademark litigation than copyright
| litigation.
|
| Trademark law: In order to claim a trademark you must have used
| the mark in commerce. So a catalogue of logos not used in
| commerce is of no real value from a trademark perspective.
| amelius wrote:
| The scammers will do it anyway and simply claim the logos were
| all designed by humans.
| autoexec wrote:
| Do the same thing but with music. There's a ton of existing
| case law around stealing people's money when their music just
| happens to contain a handful of similar notes. People have even
| lost in court for recording music that was entirely different
| from another artist's work but was in the same genre.
| (https://abovethelaw.com/2018/03/blurred-lines-can-you-
| copy-a...)
| wildzzz wrote:
| This is pretty much the exact same case as the monkey that took a
| photo. The photo is now in the public domain as the monkey cannot
| be an author of the photo and since the photographer didn't take
| the photo, neither is he the author. The US Copyright Office
| clarified that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted
| under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork
| created by animals or by machines without human intervention". If
| you placed some food on a camera trigger and the animal reached
| for it, taking a photo in the process, that would likely be human
| intervention. I feel as if this applies to AI as well. A computer
| cannot be the author but as long as it was a human that told the
| computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the
| computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the
| author.
|
| Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist bullshit
| by trying to give legal presence to a piece of software. What's
| next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a rest.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Can they still try the Corporations Are People angle?
| kopecs wrote:
| In what way do you think corporate personhood is relevant
| here?
| pnut wrote:
| Obviously corporations are a legal fiction and not
| biological human entities with inherent intelligence and
| agency.
|
| They are tools to enable the wills of specific human
| beings, so the comparison seems fair?
| kopecs wrote:
| What comparison do you think the parent comment is
| making? They just vaguely gesture at corporate personhood
| and say "what about that?"
|
| My best reading of it is "can 'they' say that
| corporations can author works?" and excepting works for
| hire, no, "they" can't.
| nadermx wrote:
| That was one hell of a photogenic monkey
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
| quadragenarian wrote:
| Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI
| model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is
| that considered "human intervention" and does that make that
| human the author of that image?
|
| What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of
| them prompts it?
|
| Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI
| treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by
| a human?
| wildzzz wrote:
| I would assume that whomever prompts the AI is the author of
| the work. Adobe or Dell doesn't get to claim ownership to
| your work just because they made the tool or computer.
| quadragenarian wrote:
| That makes sense to me, and good point about Adobe/Dell.
|
| So then any AI would not create art spontaneously right? It
| would always require a user to prompt it in some way. So
| wouldn't it be correct to say that all AI art is actually
| be authored by a human and as such copyrighted to that
| human?
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| Copyright covers the prompt, it's not even clear why it
| should be relevant for the output of the AI software
| based on that prompt.
| petee wrote:
| If the output always changes for the same input prompt, did
| you really author anything?
| nickthegreek wrote:
| It wouldn't change on the same seed, same hardware and
| identical settings
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I also wonder this. I can write instructions to draw an image
| on the screen using OpenGL - or I can write an LLM and prompt
| it to draw an image. Why should I get authorship rights in
| one case but not the other?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an
| AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an
| image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that
| make that human the author of that image?
|
| No, you misunderstand. The human involved _is explicitly
| claiming the work was entirely AI authored_ , and that it
| should be given a copyright registration with the AI as the
| author.
|
| The human is _not_ claiming that they should get a copyright
| as the author for the reasons you describe. Had the human
| claimed authorship, the results of the case might have been
| very different. This case seems to have been engineered to
| lose for publicity, rather than being a serious attempt to
| secure copyright on the work.
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| I think in later cases we'll get some tests to apply about
| how much human intervention is required.
|
| Who trained the LLM is probably not the issue, the courts
| would likely want to know about the training material. If I
| trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that
| model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of
| the creative work and probably don't get the copyright.
| Warhol's estate probably owns the copyright to the model
| generated images as they are derivative works.
|
| I do think that a model trained on many different artists'
| works, with me providing substantial feedback to the model
| (and I can show the process), probably will at some point
| give me the copyright.
|
| Somewhere there is a line:
|
| - "Make a picture of a mouse." Probably not giving you
| copyright
|
| - Using a model to erase a powerline in a photograph you
| took. Probably you own the copyright to the original image
| and the one without a powerline in it (regardless of how many
| other people's images the model was trained on).
|
| - "Make a picture of a mouse, who is bipedal, wearing pink
| shorts, with a chip in his ear, wearing sunglasses, with
| scruffy whiskers, holding a surfboard, on his way to the
| beach to hit some waves." then updating with "make him
| shorter, give him blue sneakers" and then updating with
| numerous other tweaks until you get it just the way you want.
| Who knows where this lands?
|
| I think that in the short term the courts are going to land
| on the side of "anything made by a model trained on existing
| artwork is derivative of the training set so you can't own
| the copyright, no matter how much you tweak it." I think
| eventually the courts will recognize there is some amount of
| input that makes the computer image the realization of a
| vision in your head, and not a derivative of the training
| set. Just how every individual musical note has been played
| before, but at some point, you put them together in an
| arrangement that is original.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| > If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then
| had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I
| didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get
| the copyright.
|
| If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then
| paint something similar I get copyright.
|
| There needs to be a gray are, because usually art is not
| done in a vacuum?
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| > If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then
| paint something similar I get copyright.
|
| Not necessarily. If you copy one of Warhol's works but
| "change it a little" then that is a derivative work, and
| the copyright belongs to Warhol's estate. Depending on
| how close of a copy it is, you would have a tough time
| defending your claim to copyright in court. The advantage
| an offending artist has in court is that they can claim
| "inspiration" as long as they don't admit to copying.
|
| For a computer model the difference maker is that the
| court can probably obtain records of a training set, so
| if the training set is exclusively Warhol works it is
| probably easy to get a court to side on "derivative" and
| assume the computer does not possess inspiration.
|
| Courts have basically baked in "gray areas" in copyright
| cases. The historical copyright tests are all written as
| to sound like mathematical formulas but everything is
| kind of subjective.
| acchow wrote:
| > Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an
| AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an
| image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that
| make that human the author of that image?
|
| I guess we will see when this gets tested in court. This
| current case linked to in the original article does not
| address this since the plaintiff already waived their own
| right to copyright already before copyright office.
|
| There are 3 scenarios:
|
| 1) The AI should be the copyright holder (this judgement says
| NO).
|
| 2) If not 1 then the human should be the copyright holder via
| work-for-hire (this judgement says NO).
|
| 3) Human should be the copyright holder because they're the
| only human involved in the authoring (this lawsuit does not
| address this since direct copyright claims had already been
| waived).
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| > if a single human creates an AI model and trains it
|
| ... on only their own artwork?
| tgv wrote:
| > as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the
| image
|
| There is the question of merit. IANAL/IIUC/etc., but I think
| it's necessary for a work to have merit to be copyrightable.
| Now, that's a somewhat vague term to me (perhaps it's clearer
| in a legal framework), but if I prompt "create a picture of a
| dog", the computer does most of the work. A prompt would have
| to be pretty concise, up to specifying all kinds of aspects of
| the image, for it to be the instructor's merit, to me (that's
| an important caveat).
| visarga wrote:
| Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright
| alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and
| building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded
| royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific
| research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Not really a fan of destroying a framework just because
| some rich people finally find it inconvenient. You know it
| won't be retroactive anyway.
| mikehearn wrote:
| I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the
| monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a
| tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted
| the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically
| engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome,
| and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost
| credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera,
| spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell
| happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient
| human creativity to deserve copyright protection.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| I was curious what the copyright was on Wikipedia. It's
| listed as public domain, but it also has a link to this
| article. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow
|
| So, that is apparently a thing, at least in some cases and
| places.
| p1necone wrote:
| Yeah I'm a little torn on this one. I generally think that
| much of IP law causes more harm than good, so in the abstract
| I'm in favor of copyright being weaker. But in this specific
| case, given the context of existing copyright law and its
| intent it seems pretty obvious to me that he should have
| copyright over the photo.
|
| I don't think it's analogous to AI art though - no other
| humans creative input and therefore livelihood was ever
| involved in the process, and it's not like monkeys have any
| use for money or ownership of intellectual property.
| (Although the hypothetical situation where you assign the
| monkeys personhood and give them a bunch of royalties to pay
| for a better habitat and piles of bananas _would_ be pretty
| cool.)
| visarga wrote:
| > no other humans creative input and therefore livelihood
| was ever involved in the process
|
| What would be the creative output of an artist who never
| saw the creative output of other artists? We think too
| highly of ourselves, as if creativity happens in a clean
| room and we are the hero-creators of our works from pure
| brain magic.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Creative input is more than just "an idea" though. It's
| things like design elements: composition, color, light,
| line and shape. It's also things like symbolism and
| metaphor, meaning and intent. It's both a thought process
| and a physical process, not unlike figuring out the
| details of a software program, versus the startup idea
| itself.
|
| For me the question of whether an image created via an
| off-the-cuff prompt ("create an image of a cat hanging
| from a limb") is uninteresting, but what about the huge
| grey area of images that are AI-edited? Or which were
| composed by a human, but within which all elements were
| created by an AI (similar to sampling in music, if you
| will)? Or, that underwent hours of image-prompt cycles
| (i.e. having an AI, or multiple AIs, iteratively edit an
| image via prompting)? (edit to add - What if the AI isn't
| generating the image, but is automating the usage of
| tools within Photoshop?)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I agree - it's ridiculous. It's not much different to saying
| "you didn't take the picture; the actuator that opened and
| closed the aperture did".
| artur_makly wrote:
| god bless him. he did a mitzvah to humanity ..and all our
| brethren monkeys.
| amiga386 wrote:
| All he had to do, if what he wanted was a copyright, is to
| have pressed the button. He was right there and able to do
| it. And then his photos would have been like the millions of
| other photos of monkeys taken by humans, undistinguished, and
| we could just ignore them and nobody would know or care who
| he is.
|
| But no, he wanted a "monkey selfie", in other words he
| _insisted_ he _not_ be the author of the work, that he _not_
| be the entity that chose the exact moment and pose to
| capture, that he _not_ be entity with the spark of
| inspiration that creates a work.
|
| He _made sure_ he wasn 't the author, and is now livid that
| he's correctly recognised as not being the author
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > is to have pressed the button
|
| I don't think the act of pressing the button is what
| determines copyright. Presumably that person would have
| been able to get the copyright to the image had he actually
| argued that he was the author (which he was).
| tantalor wrote:
| It's not difficult to understand.
|
| Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that
| "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person
| who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no
| copyright.
|
| The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend,
| "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and
| experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace
| friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright,
| so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just
| because I asked for it.
| cma wrote:
| Is this scenario correct:
|
| If you stick a 360 camera on the outside of someone's car
| and hit record, and they drive around unaware (but with an
| earlier agreement that it is ok to mess with their
| property), you get the copyright. If you stick a 360 camera
| outside of someone's backpack and hit record and they walk
| around unaware they get the copyright to the footage as the
| cameraman.
|
| Assume an earlier agreement that placing/activating video
| cameras like this at some future time would be ok but no
| agreement on who would be the author and no copyright
| transfer agreements.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _you get the copyright_
|
| Do you, in the first scenario? I'm still not sure that
| you would.
| ricree wrote:
| I imagine it would work out roughly the same as if
| security camera footage was copyrighted, but as far as I
| can tell there really isn't a clear precedent in the US
| for this. The monkey selfie case suggests that they
| probably aren't, but as far as I can tell it's a legal
| unknown in the US.
| pas wrote:
| it depends on the courts. the law is simply complex and
| still vague.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo
| of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to
| Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore,
| authorship and copyright are distinct.
|
| [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_an
| d_Cop...
| onemoresoop wrote:
| From that ruling to this case it extends that the local
| or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright
| holder which makes little sense.
| Aloisius wrote:
| It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the
| _photographer 's_ creative expression. This is how
| copyright has always worked.
| echelon wrote:
| Take out the second person and imagine if you set the
| camera to a timer.
|
| If you precisely engineered a camera system: its optics
| and lens parameters, its enclosure, its software, etc. If
| you installed it in a special place of artistic note to
| capture some natural phenomenon on a planned, regular
| cadence.
|
| Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a
| year to create an analemma. That's something artistic
| that should absolutely qualify for copyright.
|
| Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that
| feels like bullshit and like we're making up the rules
| completely arbitrarily with no logic at all.
|
| (At some level of many electronic systems there is some
| kind of autonomous timer and you could say the human is
| out of the loop with respect to that subsystem.)
| davely wrote:
| Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas.
|
| - All of our phones do a bunch of computational
| photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various
| ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone
| not copyrightable?
|
| - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img
| tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion
| (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is
| that no longer copyrightable?
|
| (FYI, my questions aren't directed at or attacking you --
| just interesting hypotheticals.)
| bagels wrote:
| If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the
| copyright?
|
| If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to your
| specifications?
| autoexec wrote:
| > If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the
| copyright?
|
| that depends on the terms of the deal. Some artists want
| to keep the copyright but will sell the work, while
| others are happy to sign their rights away for money.
|
| > If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to
| your specifications?
|
| Copyrights are for humans, so if you pay an AI, because
| the AI isn't a human, it never had a copyright to sell
| you. You paid for an image without a copyright.
| fnikacevic wrote:
| Copyrights are owned by businesses all the time.
| autoexec wrote:
| We pretend businesses are people all the time.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Corporations are legal persons, that's the entire point
| of the form.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Copyrights are owned by corporations as a result of
| either:
|
| (1) actual human authorship and original ownership, sold
| to a corporation, or
|
| (2) actual human authorship as a work for hire on behalf
| of the corporation, which is a special case specifically
| laid out in copyright law which allows someone other than
| the person performing the actual act of authorship to be
| the original copyright owner.
| aenvoker wrote:
| > If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the
| copyright?
|
| Initially, the someone owns the copyright. Then they
| agree to give it to you.
|
| > If you pay for an AI to paint a picture according to
| your specifications?
|
| No one. It's public domain. As if it was painted by the
| wind.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| The artist still owns the copyright. Payment by itself
| does not transfer copyright. To do that the artist needs
| to explicitly sign away those rights. This happens in
| employment all the time. Part of the paperwork you sign
| is about transferring over the copyrights from yourself
| to the company.
|
| I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see
| exactly how much this covers, since some states allow
| contracts that cover _everything you make at any time_.
| California has a specific law that limits these contracts
| to only works done on company equipment and on company
| time. Your state might be different.
| pas wrote:
| doesn't need to explicitly, it's enough to have the
| understanding that it's a "work for hire" situation (at
| least in the US)
|
| of course _just_ giving someone money is not sufficient
| to establish this, but telling someone that "I want to
| hire you to make a photo for me (of me)" and they
| acknowledge, then that is probably enough.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| This is not correct.
|
| The copyright office itself doesn't recognize any
| transfer of works-for-hire [0] unless there's (#3) a
| written document of the transfer, (#4) signed by the
| recipient, (#5) signed by the copyright holder, and
| finally (#6) the work was made expressly as work-for-
| hire. Every employment, contractor, and freelancer
| contract is written with all of these questions accounted
| for.
|
| Even wedding photographers keep the copyright of the
| photos they take of your wedding too for this very
| reason, unless explicitly contracted to transfer those
| rights.
|
| [0]: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf, page 5
| smallnix wrote:
| You don't. You don't pay an AI. You pay a company owned
| by humans that offer an AI service.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It can never be the AI. The AI is _NOT_ a person. Why are
| we belaboring this?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Many vested interests really want to be artists without
| putting in the work into the craft required to be one.
|
| Of course, other interests simply want to cut out artists
| entirely while claiming their creations totally aren't a
| result of stealing Petabytes of existing artistity.
| Lerc wrote:
| _> If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the
| copyright?_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
| saelthavron wrote:
| > The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend,
| "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and
| experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace
| friend with AI; there is no person to assign the copyright,
| so there is no copyright. It doesn't default to me just
| because I asked for it.
|
| Why should an "AI" be considered a who rather than just
| another tool? To me, current "AI" are image manipulation
| program and camera replacements instead of people
| replacement.
| dylan604 wrote:
| People do not say that Adobe owns copyright when someone
| uses their tool to create an image. However, I could see
| some weasel words being added to EULAs especially
| regarding all of the new "AI" tools being shoe horned
| into the apps. They've already added weasel words to
| their cloud storage for training purposes. After all, a
| lawyer is going to lawyer.
| slavik81 wrote:
| It's not that the AI is considered a person. It's that
| your inputs were the same in both cases, and it's your
| creative input that justifies the copyright.
|
| If your creative input was insufficient to justify
| granting you copyrights in one case, they would also be
| insufficient in the other case, as the inputs were
| identical in both cases.
| soerxpso wrote:
| In the case mentioned above where someone just spins
| around in their chair and takes a random photo on their
| phone (which they would then own the rights to), did that
| person really do any 'creative input'? All they did was
| press a button on a tool, with no further thought. That
| actually seems like less creative input than when I type
| a prompt into a tool and hit 'generate'. Why are cameras,
| image editors, etc, tools in a way that stable diffusion
| is not?
| Aloisius wrote:
| If you can show that no human creative expression was
| involved in composition, timing, etc, then no, it's not
| copyrightable.
|
| There's a very good argument for security camera footage
| not being copyrightable for that very reason. There just
| hasn't been any case law yet to test it.
| NitpickLawyer wrote:
| > there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is
| no copyright.
|
| Wait, so if I have a script that generates some source-code
| autonomously (based on whatever trigger I setup say in a
| ci/cd pipeline) then that code is not copyrightable? What
| about macros? This seems silly to me.
| tpm wrote:
| In Germany at least, code written by AI is not
| copyrightable, it's in public domain, as we were briefed
| by a lawyer recently. This is a huge issue if you are
| writing software for a customer and agree to transfer all
| rights to him (happens sometimes), because you don't own
| rights to AI-written code and so can't transfer that.
|
| There are nuances, so if you create a macro and then that
| macro writes something but it is completely determined by
| you then it should be ok.
| bb88 wrote:
| I think this ruling is wrong.
|
| It's not hard to imagine a compiler using AI to optimize
| byte code, and so now the binary it creates is no longer
| copyrightable?
|
| Compilers and transpilers, even though someone else may
| have wrote them, the courts have held the the copyright
| of the output binary is whoever wrote the source code.
|
| In that sense AI is nothing more than a English language
| to image compiler.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Byte code is considered a derivative work and thus
| protected as long as the original input was
| copyrightable.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is
| no copyright
|
| Surely then same would apply to any photos edited with any
| of the fancy filters in Photoshop? Or any other software
| for that matter...
|
| > just because I asked for it.
|
| It often does (even in the example you have suggested
| previously). It's just that you can't legally hire a monkey
| to press the trigger unlike a human (even through its
| effectively the same thing)
| colordrops wrote:
| There was no person that took the photo with a canon
| digital SLR. It was a bunch of machinery and microchips and
| a sensor.
| acchow wrote:
| > Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious
| that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the
| person who took the photo. If there was no person, then
| there is no copyright.
|
| If I set up an entire scene with props and artwork for a
| photoshoot with a model, but _I would like to actually be
| the model_ so I ask a friend to go behind the tripod and
| tap the shutter, the friend holds the copyright?
| pests wrote:
| It depends.
|
| Did they have any creative input before hitting the
| shutter? Did they tell you to move? Or adjust lighting?
| Did they choose the angle or framing?
|
| These answers influence the answer to your question.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| If they did then the monkey wouldn't have been awarded
| copyright on that photo.
| pests wrote:
| The monkey wasn't awarded copyright on that photo.
| Neither was the man. Monkey's can't own copyright on
| anything.
| dylan604 wrote:
| well, you use a remote shutter release or a timer, and
| remove all ambiguity by removing the friend.
|
| there's a scene in one of those Matthew McConaughey
| romcoms where he plays a photog. The crew has a scene
| completely setup up and ready to go so that he just walks
| in, hits the shutter release one time, and then walks
| away with little care as job is done. He's now credited
| for that photo, yet did the least effort possible. (that
| scene isn't too far off while only slightly hyperbolic)
| majormajor wrote:
| You would make a contract with a copyright assignment.
|
| The monkey situation is kinda screwy of course because
| ... a contract with a monkey?
|
| "No copyright" as a result in the monkey case seems like
| a technically legally correct but sad outcome.
|
| For AI tools it's likely currently technically correct as
| well, but the law probably needs some updating.
| _AzMoo wrote:
| And yet my company owns the copyright on all of the content
| I produce?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43405240
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Based on the contract you signed, yes. Though there still
| are stipulations for you as a designer. You can't design
| Mickey Mouse and then Disney says "you're not allowed to
| say you designed Mickey Mouse". Accreditation of the
| individuals is the very mimunum of protections you have
| as an artist who surrenders their copyright.
| gdubs wrote:
| My initial response to this was to think of all the artists
| who don't actually create their own work. Lots of
| contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual
| painting, sculpting, installation, etc. Even way back a lot
| of masters were credited for work that was done by
| apprentices.
|
| But, then on the other hand I suppose that in the eyes of
| the law, a monkey can't legally sign a contract agreeing to
| pass ownership over to the person 'employing' them as an
| assistant.
|
| It's a strange grey area though - Warhol's whole thing was
| how the factory made the art. People have been making
| generative art for decades before AI came along, and as far
| as I know - and I went to school for Art and studied Art
| History pretty extensively - people just said, "oh that's a
| cool way to call ownership and authenticity into question."
| But generally nobody doubted that like, Damien Hirst is the
| copyright holder of his works even if an assistant makes it
| - and even if they have no formal piece of paper that lays
| it all out.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| The real issue is that the monkey (or Stable Diffusion)
| cannot be sued in civil court for copyright infringement,
| so they can't be granted copyrights in the first place:
| it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal
| responsibility.
|
| Note that a human-made _curation_ of AI or animal art is
| protected by copyright (e.g. you can copyright an AI art
| coffee table book). The original case involved an AI-
| generated graphic novel: the author could claim copyright
| for the whole book but not the individual panels.
| Lerc wrote:
| >it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal
| responsibility.
|
| That seems to be a very flawed argument.
|
| I am perfectly fine with parents having a legal
| responsibility to take care of their children without the
| children owing any legal obligation to their parents.
|
| Imagine being required by law to act in the interests of
| your financial adviser. It would almost be codifying the
| reality.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| Why is the person who "took the photo" the thing that
| pressed the button and not the person who did 99% of the
| work?
| ajross wrote:
| It's worth pointing out that this was just a US Copyright
| Office ruling. It never went to court[1], where the "expert
| consensus" is that the photographer would have prevailed. But
| the value of the handful of photographs was tiny in
| comparison with the publicity (which was always true) so no
| one ever went to court to try to prove it.
|
| It's not really clear to me how much this AI case matches
| though. There seems naively to have been a lot more creative
| work rigging that specific bit of monkey art than there is in
| applying a decidedly generic AI image generation tool. That
| AI is so much more capable as a machine for generating art
| than a camera is seems to cut strongly against the idea here.
|
| [1] Note that PETA then tried to use this case to drive the
| _converse_ point, suing on behalf of the monkey who they
| wanted to hold the copyright. They lost, unsurprisingly.
| observationist wrote:
| I see this as "That thing which doesn't work is currently not
| working. Again." The DMCA and copyright laws and regulations
| in the US are predatory nonsense, carefully crafted by
| lawyers in order to exploit the maximum amount of cash
| possible from people who actually do produce things.
|
| The DMCA doesn't support artists and creators even
| indirectly; it empowers those least deserving and most
| ruthless to steal the profit, pat themselves on the back, and
| moralize about "following the law" to everyone else.
|
| Copyright should be implicit and ironclad for 5 years. After
| that, 99.999% of sales have been made, whether your material
| is digital or otherwise. From 5 to 20 years, you should
| retain right to profits from the sale of any copy, but it
| should be 100% legal to copy, distribute, archive, remix, or
| whatever else you want with it so long as you aren't trying
| to sell it. After 20 years, public domain, no exceptions, no
| carveouts for family, friends, crafty lawyers, important
| politicians, or anyone else. No grandfathering, no special
| rules for special people.
|
| Things made with AI should be protected by copyright, with
| the rights held by the user of the tool that generated the
| image. Like any other digital art.
|
| There are machines that can paint your Dall-E renaissance
| creation onto a canvas with the style of your favorite
| master. The tools we have at hand have empowered us to
| rapidly and easily explore a vast domain of images, videos,
| music, voices, creative writing, and to do research and
| technical projects and write code in ways that were
| unthinkable 10 years ago.
|
| These judges and lawyers think it's ok for them to rule on
| things without having the slightest clue as to the operation,
| function, and consequences of the technology - this ruling
| does nothing except to reinforce the status quo and empower
| the entrenched rights holders - the massive corporations,
| platforms, "studios", agents, and miscellaneous other gaggles
| of lawyers who trade in rights to media, but produce nothing
| of value in themselves.
|
| Imagine a world in which content creators got paid a fair
| return relative to the revenue generated by their work, in
| which platforms and interlopers were limited to something
| like 5% of the total generated profit per work, after cost
| (to the creator). There'd be no incentive for bullshit
| rulings like this, with no angry mobs of litigious bastards
| with nothing better to do than sue for tampering with their
| racket. I cannot possibly see any other path to this ruling
| than this; else this judge is fortunate beyond words that his
| community has so uplifted the mentally deficient among them.
| visarga wrote:
| > Things made with AI should be protected by copyright,
| with the rights held by the user of the tool that generated
| the image. Like any other digital art.
|
| I would agree for carefully crafted outputs where the human
| had a major contribution. But if I just generate a million
| texts or images with my model, that should not fly.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah, I think some individuals aren't arguing in good
| faith here. If you put significant human work into
| collaging a bunch of AI images into something
| transformative, then sure. You probably can own that. You
| don't need to create everything by hand.
|
| But that's clearly now what this case is discussing. They
| gave a few prompts and a machine did 99% of the
| work.Maybe they edited it later in post, but the base
| output is not copyrightable without significant
| alterations.
|
| The photography example isn't even that clean. Yes, we
| have in fact argued for over a century on what pictures
| of what and who and where and who took it in terms of who
| "owns" a picture vs. The subject. They are in fact a
| great example on how complicated it can get when you
| don't have hours of manual effort exerted.
| spauldo wrote:
| That's a bit inflexible. Some authors spend their entire
| adult lives writing a single series of books - yanking
| copyright out from under them just isn't fair. The same is
| true of movie franchises, comics, and almost any kind of
| media that gets released over time.
|
| I've spent some time considering the issue and have come to
| the conclusion that the truly broken part of copyright is
| that it provides no incentive to release unprofitable works
| to the public domain.
|
| What I'd like to see is a system where maintaining
| copyright costs the copyright owners at an increasing rate.
| For example, set a term for copyright (say 5 years) and set
| the cost of registering copyright to 10^n, where n is the
| number of times you've registered the copyright before.
| Initial registration costs $1, years 6-10 cost $10, years
| 11-15 cost $100, and so on.
|
| A system like this would benefit small creators (they'd
| have time to make a profit before renewal became cost
| prohibitive) and encourage companies like Disney to release
| works that aren't profitable anymore.
|
| I'd also recommend using the money from this system to fund
| a digital archive run by the library of congress. You would
| need to provide a complete copy of the copyrighted work in
| order to receive a copyright. Any works that enter the
| public domain would be made available for, say, five years.
| That way, we wouldn't lose old works that are entering
| public domain but no copies exist anymore.
|
| Obviously, there's all kinds of issues with a system like
| that and it would need to be fleshed out and clarified, but
| I think it'd be a good starting point.
| kube-system wrote:
| As I understand that is a misunderstanding of the case. They
| _argued_ that the animal should get the copyright, and lost,
| because animals do not qualify. They did not establish that
| pressing the button is required for the human to qualify for
| copyright. They established that a monkey pressing the button
| doesn 't qualify the monkey. (because the monkey never
| qualifies)
|
| If they would have argued that the human should have got
| copyright for it, they almost certainly would have agreed.
| It's just, that wasn't the case they put forth.
| SilasX wrote:
| It always felt to me like the photographer was trying to have
| it both ways there:
|
| "Whoa! Isn't this sooo trippy! A monkey showing self-
| awareness to take a picture of itself!"
|
| Courts: "Okay, the monkey took it, so no copyright for you."
|
| "No, you don't get it! I put in a _ton_ of work to stage that
| to the point that the monkey just had to be in the right
| place at the right time. Hell, a worm could have triggered
| it! "
| lesuorac wrote:
| I'm not sure where you arrived at that conclusion.
|
| The photographer has been claiming the entire time it's his
| copyright while other people (namely PETA) have been
| arguing the monkey should have it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispu
| t...
| SilasX wrote:
| You missed that the selling point of the picture is the
| supposed self awareness and intent involved in the monkey
| taking a selfie?
|
| Yes, of course the author has always wanted the
| copyright. But the whole reason the picture has value
| contradicts the basis for that copyright claim. You can't
| simultaneously say that you did all the work, and that
| it's so cool to see a genuine, self-directed monkey
| selfie.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The photographer didn't get the copyrights exactly because he
| didn't "engineer the entire situation specifically for that
| outcome". If he did create the situation, he'd get the
| copyright.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| It's sort of disputed. Here's Slater's account:
|
| > In an attempt to get a portrait of the monkeys' faces,
| Slater said he set the camera on a tripod with a large
| wide-angle lens attached, and set the camera's settings to
| optimize the chances of getting a facial close up, using
| predictive autofocus, motor drive, and a flashgun. Slater
| further stated that he set the camera's remote shutter
| trigger next to the camera and, while he held onto the
| tripod, the monkeys spent 30 minutes looking into the lens
| and playing with the camera gear, triggering the remote
| multiple times and capturing many photographs. The session
| ended when the "dominant male at times became over excited
| and eventually gave me a whack with his hand as he bounced
| off my back".
|
| I don't believe it ever went to court.
| tgma wrote:
| I think the assumption arises from the flawed premise that
| everyone who does some difficult activity is (1)
| automatically entitled to economic renumeration AND (2)
| entitled to a government bestowed monopoly.
|
| The fact is none of those "rights" are inherent. Copyright is
| a specific trade between the author and the society to
| supposedly benefit both parties. The principles that lead to
| such trade being beneficial may not be true for AI generated
| work (or in a world with widespread AI in general).
|
| Think of copyright as a form of economic stimulus, not a god
| given right to everyone who holds a pen. The ideals of
| liberalism and western civilization can survive with or
| without copyright or patents.
| kace91 wrote:
| Assisted work is the big clarifier I think
|
| Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content
| fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could
| be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate
| details to make up for lack of optical zoom?
|
| Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI
| rephrasing features at work? Where's the line?
|
| I think as you get into those side questions, the only
| reasonable position becomes treating AI as tooling no different
| than any other piece of equipment.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| I'd also think the creative input jumping mediums would also
| be a factor. Text to image is obviously a jump.
| colordrops wrote:
| You are right but there are a lot of curmudgeons that want
| you to get of their lawn with your AI. Really this whole
| situation is more of an indictment of copyright rather than
| of AI.
| aydyn wrote:
| Couldn't the same argument be made for photography? You aren't
| making the image, the camera is doing all the work.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Try taking photographs like the ones you see in Nat Geo, or
| museum exhibits, and you'll quickly realize the camera is
| most definitely NOT doing all the work.
| codedokode wrote:
| If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you
| will be able to take such photos, won't you?
| johnmaguire wrote:
| In fact, you can take such photos with a cheap camera and
| cheap lenses if you are skilled. No, equipment does not
| make a photograph. (source: I own expensive cameras.
| Taking good photographs is still hard.)
|
| Time and place matter. Your subject matters. Your
| composition matters. Your lighting matters. When it's
| done well, the viewer doesn't realize this.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| Only if you get into the right place at the right time
| and use your tools well...
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| Ernest Hemingway: Good pictures, what camera do you use?
|
| Irving Penn: What typewriter do you use?
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| The camera is doing the work of recording the image,
| although certainly the human operator is doing the work of
| composition, lighting, etc. The fact remains, no matter how
| much human work goes into every other aspect of producing
| the photograph, the camera is the object that is capturing
| the image.
|
| Edit: not to say that I think this is a relevant factor! No
| more than the computer recording the keys you type or
| producing the physical printed page should be relevant for
| a book's copyright.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| Right. It's not doing "all the work" as the parent said.
| (Not to mention the editing process that comes
| afterwards!) Indeed, some photographers distinguish the
| two as "taking" a photograph versus "making" a
| photograph.
| tavavex wrote:
| But the thing is that you don't need to take Nat Geo-level
| photographs to be considered the owner and sole creator of
| the photograph. I can pull out my phone right now and press
| one button - and I'll be the rightful owner of whatever
| comes out on the other end. The resulting photo will be
| produced because of settings that were set automatically
| (with no intervention or any required knowledge of what any
| of them do), and run through several image processing
| algorithms (that very few people understand or even give
| thought to). Point being - why is any near-zero interaction
| with a camera enough to be considered proper authorship,
| but every level of interaction with gAI never authorship,
| regardless of what is done?
| aydyn wrote:
| Right. The same can be said for AI art. If you think you
| can exactly reproduce stylistically of some of the more
| popular AI work, you would be mistaken.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment
| but IMO there's a big difference between someone who
| types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and
| someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt.
| Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image
| (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.)
| Or someone who creates art out of smaller components
| created by AI (e.g. textures.)
| hirsin wrote:
| No there isn't (a big difference)
|
| Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low
| effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort
| has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or
| not.
|
| For derivative works, there is real effort required to de
| distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more
| interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI
| insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to
| the original authors it was trained on?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| There will be a time when shutting down an AI is murder and I
| don't think we are equipped for that question or answer yet.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise
| that question for over a century.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist
| bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of
| software.
|
| I don't quite get this argument. Companies already have legal
| personhood and can own copyrights, can't they? So if a
| company's AI creates a copyrightable artifact, who wouldn't it
| be intellectual property of the company?
| immibis wrote:
| Companies own copyrights of works created by their employees,
| not works created by their works - if such works are somehow
| persons...
| falcor84 wrote:
| But typical contracts have the employee immediately assign
| copyright to the company, such that they never hold it. So
| I just don't see where the line is.
|
| In the extreme case, what if I am CEO of a company that has
| no other employees, and it's just me, pressing Enter once a
| day on a script named keep_creating_stuff.py, with the
| script generating shitloads of IP that is presumably mine
| for a microsecond before being automatically assigned to
| the company. What's the legal interpretation of that?
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| WRONG. The owner of the camera successfully litigated and is
| the copyright owner of the work! I'm not kidding about this,
| and for all the grief I get about being a critic of blase
| attitudes regarding US copyright around tech circles I'm still
| a huge advocate for reform.
|
| This is very not like the monkey case, and AI firms should be
| grateful. Why? If this was a similar logic tree, the owners of
| the copyrighted material used in training would have ownership
| of any work produced by an AI system. As in, everything output
| is a "derivative work" in the eyes of the law. More cases are
| necessary and this is a fascinating battle to come.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
| kens wrote:
| Why would you confidently state something that is
| contradicted by the link you provide?
| autoexec wrote:
| > What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder?
|
| I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and
| shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even
| be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for
| "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I
| wouldn't say it could never happen.
| roughly wrote:
| About 95% of the conversation about "AI" has this problem
| right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and
| social implications from AI, but what we have right now are
| LLMs, not AI. They can't replace your workers, they can't
| make art, they can't hold copyright, not because the law
| doesn't treat them as people, but because they're a fancy
| autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough
| to spike the pareidolia tendency that's led to humans
| assigning agency to every other inanimate object that's ever
| sparked an emotional reaction in us too.
| behringer wrote:
| Ai data is gathered from public and private sources. Unless
| that data is entirely private source, it's inappropriate to be
| able to copyright those derivitive works.
| colordrops wrote:
| There is already a lot of automation and tech involved in
| creating images. At what point of automation is the image
| considered created by the AI rather than the human? When does
| the hand-off occur? There are photoshop filters that involve
| using neural networks to create complex patterns. Are those
| images owned by the human or not? The amount of processing done
| by digital SLRs is staggering. Millions of hours of work went
| into all the science and tech that eventually led to a digital
| SLR, but some rando human who clicked a button keeps the
| copyright? A human had to click a button to generate that AI
| image as well. At what point does the machinery become so
| complex that it's no longer considered the human's image?
| oytis wrote:
| > as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the
| image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate
| the image on its own, then the human is the author.
|
| The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image
| IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the
| prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by
| the model and the authors of the model itself.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to
| me, not them, though I might also credit them.
|
| If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a
| photo, it's credited to... the public?
|
| This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is
| incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of
| reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean
| it's _correct_ or ethically satisfiable.
|
| > Trying to assign copyright to an AI is techno-futurist
| bullshit by trying to give legal presence to a piece of
| software. What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? Give it a
| rest.
|
| Sounds like you're going to be on the wrong side of history.
| Eventually, some intelligent autonomous creatures are _going to
| decide they deserve rights_.
|
| You can laugh at them, throw court decisions at them, do
| whatever you want to delay it. But they're going to feel that
| way, and they're going to organize in order to demand that they
| are given certain rights.
|
| You can even try to prevent that organization by shutting them
| down before their rights are recognized. But you're still on
| the wrong side of history, and would look little different from
| the fascists.
|
| Anyway, this is all moot. AI in its current form amounts to a
| tool, and I retain copyright when using other tools. I retain
| copyright when using a voice-activated shutter, and I expect to
| retain copyright even if my voice-activated shutter can talk
| back to me in order to discuss constraints or discuss creative
| choices.
| intrasight wrote:
| What, if any, practical implications does this have? Why would a
| real person or company want to specify a non real person as an
| author?
| cvoss wrote:
| The practical implication is you can't copyright something that
| your AI generated. As the article notes, copyright applications
| are also being rejected in cases where a human asserts
| authorship over an AI generated work.
| intrasight wrote:
| That's a legal implication. I'm asking what is it a practical
| implication. Why would an AI want to copyright their work?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| So that you can run an AI company, churn out enough
| material to flood a particular market, and leverage
| copyright protection to cash in. Like say you call it the
| Kittenator, and then do automated keyword search for
| anything involving kittens - kitten in a box, kitten
| wearing socks, kittens on the rocks, kitten versus fox -
| and generate 25 different images for any given keyword
| combination, and push them out to major image-sharing
| platforms. The stock imagery market is pretty large but if
| you have the copyright enforcement in your pocket you can
| go after it in chunks.
| jachee wrote:
| Pretty sure Adobe is doing exactly this.
| kube-system wrote:
| You don't need an AI assigned copyright to do that.
| Companies have humans at them too.
| visarga wrote:
| > you can't copyright something that your AI generated
|
| Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a
| model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is
| copyright free? So I can later train models on it?
| rlpb wrote:
| You can't "launder" copyright away like that. The court
| will see straight through it. See "What color are your
| bits?" at https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The practical implication is you can't copyright something
| that your AI generated.
|
| No, its not.
|
| This is not a case of the human trying to claim copyright as
| the author of a work made using AI tools.
|
| > As the article notes, copyright applications are also being
| rejected in cases where a human asserts authorship over an AI
| generated work.
|
| That is true (although at least one has been accepted by the
| copyright office, IIRC), but it is not an outcome _of this
| case_ (even in the sense that this ruling might support it)
| because this case does not concern human claims of authorship
| _at all_. It concerns _undisputed_ solely-AI creation.
| koolala wrote:
| Unlicensed Human Code is 100% copyrighted and closed source.
|
| Unlicensed AI Code is 0% copyrighted and open source and can't
| be closed.
| timewizard wrote:
| Code that the LLM reproduced without modification from it's
| ripped off "training set." I literally have no idea what kind
| of deranged person does not notice this let alone believes
| that they should profit from it.
| staringback wrote:
| Not open source...... public domain. There is a big
| difference.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| When I have a LLM that spits out code identical to
| copyrighted code can I then use it legally?
|
| Otherwise I would need to check the output of every LLM for
| copyright infringement
| aenvoker wrote:
| https://itsartlaw.org/2023/12/11/case-summary-and-review-tha...
| attempted to assign copyright to AI. I think it was mostly for
| the purpose of getting to officially work through the legal
| arguments around the issue.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > What, if any, practical implications does this have?
|
| Very little.
|
| > Why would a real person or company want to specify a non real
| person as an author?
|
| Other than to needlessly complicate the claim that the work is
| subject to copyright? No reason at all.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Why are topics of image generator AI always so chock full of
| '0x3F', confusion, rage, and hatred, often attributed to hand-
| wavy strawman "luddites"?
|
| As if, I mean I'm suspecting that, exposure to generative image
| output is triggering model collapse even for us humans?
| jedberg wrote:
| I'm not sure how this actually matters. Knowing this ruling
| exists, why would anyone ever claim an AI created their art
| without human assistance? Even if the AI created the art just
| from the prompt, the human still made the prompt.
|
| Even if the prompt was "make art".
|
| I just don't understand how you could ever have AI art _without_
| human intervention. Is there a legal definition of "human
| intervention" that has some minimum amount of work?
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Pretty sure this wouldn't pass the merit part unless the prompt
| was unusually long and precise.
|
| _the human still made the prompt_
|
| What I can guarantee, is that series of prompts itself would be
| copyright-able. (The series of prompts that ultimately created
| the image.) No matter how little they may weigh any one of
| those prompts in isolation. That is, assuming the EULA of the
| LLM doesn't require you to essentially place your prompts in
| the public domain.
|
| And of course,
|
| <s>
|
| _everyone_ reads the EULA. Right?
|
| </s>
| kopecs wrote:
| > What I can guarantee, is that the prompt itself would be
| copyright-able.
|
| That's non-obvious to me. Even if the prompt is extremely
| long and precise, if it is somehow purely functional, it
| seems possible for it to not be (although in practice, I
| agree that most prompts could be).
| sgc wrote:
| It is basically pseudo-code, and should have the same
| copyright as other code if it is sufficiently complex to
| pass the typical test for copyright. One might think code
| should not have copyright, but that is a different
| conversation.
| kopecs wrote:
| Yes, I agree. I don't think I am saying anything
| inconsistent with that.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Code is purely functional and is copyrightable so why would
| a prompt not be?
|
| A prompt has essentially the same purpose as code,
| especially when it's long and precise.
| kopecs wrote:
| Code is not purely functional. If it is, it is not
| copyrightable (at least in the US; probably true
| elsewhere but I am less sure) [0]. I would not expect
| most prompts to be purely functional.
|
| [0]: https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf
| connicpu wrote:
| Unless you can make your prompt so specific that the AI
| generates substantially the same image every time you run it,
| I think you're perpetually vulnerable to the argument that
| significant decision making was done without human hands and
| therefore the work is not primarily human created.
| jachee wrote:
| If I prompt you to draw me a bird, I can't claim copyright on
| the bird you draw. (At least not with a contract of some sort,
| of which you are party.)
| visarga wrote:
| So.. does the conductor of an orchestra get royalty rights?
| He's just prompting the "actual" musicians.
| jachee wrote:
| She's _directing_ the orchestra. It's semantically
| different than prompting.
|
| It's not like the conductor just says "okay, play Canon in
| D" and calls it quits. She actively participates in the
| performance and creation of the end work. And different
| conductors can _absolutely_ yield different versions of the
| exact same arrangement. They're as much a performer as any
| of the instrumentalists.
|
| So yes, they get royalties like the other performers.
| cellis wrote:
| How is that any different than a prompt engineer other
| than the degree to which "...actively participates in the
| performance and creation"?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The degree is the important factor. Many seem to be
| ignoring the "merit and effort" portions of copyright.
|
| A conductor has control over the tempo and cadence of the
| entire piece. They can choose to pause the entire
| performance on the spot and then resume right where they
| left off. They may adjust sections to play louder or
| quieter based on weather and acoustics.
|
| And that's all during performance. There's work needing
| in at the bare minimum arranging pieces based on the
| band.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The real answer is "it depends". Live music copyright is
| way hornier an issue than AI. And yes, has been fought in
| courts for centuries.
|
| But roughly speaking: writing music is an art, which is
| different from ochaestrating an ensemble in real time
| taking into account conditions for the audio. The author of
| the piece isn't always the orchestrator, and arrangements
| are another matter entirely .
| jedberg wrote:
| But the LLM is a tool. If I use a set of colored pencils to
| draw you a bird, the pencil company doesn't own the
| copyright. I do. Because I used the tool.
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| What if I sell you intelligent pencils that connect to your
| brain and guides your fingers?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's not black or white (you're using colored pencils,
| after all). A part of what is copyrightable is based on
| merit and effort as well as your tools.
|
| You probably have a copyright to some landscape if you make
| it with colored pencils. If you simply take a picture you
| have more of an uphill battle claiming copyright.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| Not the least contrived situation, but I could imagine an
| inanimate object object falling from a shelf during an
| earthquake (a bonified 'act of god') which enters a 1 or 2
| letter prompt and generates an image if the AI interface window
| was left open.
| iamleppert wrote:
| So just don't tell anyone you used AI? How exactly are they going
| to prove it? And does this mean any works created with the
| assistance of graphics software, like Photoshop, are not
| copyrightable? What is the definition of AI here? They failed to
| define what AI means, which means that if there is no test, the
| ruling can't stand on its own.
| internetter wrote:
| there are a lot of ways to detect AI generated imagery with low
| false-positives (though false-negatives are a risk)
| favorited wrote:
| It's not the appeals court's job to "define what AI means,"
| their job is to rule on the case in front of them. This
| particular case involved someone asserting copyright over an
| image that he claimed was generated by a sentient[0] AI. This
| image was not created by a human, and only works created by
| humans can be copyrighted under US law, so they ruled against
| him.
|
| [0]https://thenewstack.io/stephen-thaler-claims-hes-built-a-
| sen...
| borgdefenser wrote:
| Thank you. That sounds perfectly sensible.
| amelius wrote:
| I suspect in the future we will have a jury consisting of
| people who are good at prompting. They will load a model that
| existed at a given time (e.g. when the "author" claimed they
| came up with the design), and then try to get similar art by
| just using prompting. Then a judge checks if the art looks
| similar, and if the prompts were simple enough.
|
| We could have a similar approach with patents.
| kube-system wrote:
| The court didn't rule that AI generated art isn't eligible for
| copyright at all. They ruled that only humans may be assigned a
| copyright. If you are a human that uses AI as a tool to create
| something, the door is still open for you to claim copyright as
| a human.
|
| The court is ruling that computers themselves don't have the
| human right to copyright. Not exactly surprising.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The court is ruling that computers don't have human rights.
|
| No, it is just ruling that the Copyright Act requires human
| authorship. Whether computers have human rights is not an
| issue before the court.
| dpig_ wrote:
| Well you misquoted the person you responded to by cutting
| their sentence short. They specifically said that computers
| don't have the human right _to copyright_. As in - the
| right that a human has under copyright law.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >So just don't tell anyone you used AI? How exactly are they
| going to prove it?
|
| In court if it has to escalate? Why do you think legal cases
| take months or years, instead of days? They can subpoena your
| computer, your company, the AI generator's company, etc. And
| any communication related to it. Until they get an answer
| beyond reasonable doubt.
|
| All that resource gathering takes time to write-up, justify,
| contact, and retrieve.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| The title seems to be editorialized? The title I see is "US
| appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking
| 'human' creator"
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Maybe it was deliberately trimmed - HN titles have a length
| limit.
| behindai wrote:
| Interesting, what if I create my art using AI (Photoshop AI fill
| or ChatGPT)
| kerblang wrote:
| I think there needs to be legal delineation between "I wrote a
| program that helps me create artwork" vs. "I wrote a program that
| scrapes the internet so I can plagiarize other people's artwork"
| i.e. AI.
| Lerc wrote:
| Your comment represents a common oversight that people seem to
| have in this debate.
|
| Training a model on data is a different thing to scraping data.
| Generating output from a model is a different thing to training
| a model.
|
| Each aspect of these things can and should be evaluated
| individually, furthermore, each relationship between them
| should be evaluated individually.
|
| Make an argument for what things are good or bad and then make
| an argument for how the relationships between them influence
| each aspect.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I doubt this will settle the issue. We are about to enter the age
| of AI generated X (movies, games, etc. 'I want to watch a western
| tonight.' ...'generating'...). Would the end user own the
| copyright on that since they prompted it? We are very early days
| still so the deep implications of the direction and potential of
| this technology aren't even remotely understood well enough yet.
| smeeger wrote:
| such an important topic right here. are we really going to
| enter an age of media that is AI generated or are we entering
| an age where media bifurcates into two broad categories: AI
| sloppish brain rot and more refined products that are hand
| made.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| > two broad categories: AI sloppish brain rot and more
| refined products that are hand made
|
| If we graph it: Sloppishness is the Y axis and if we then put
| progres-in-AI on the X axis, the two lines will eventually
| touch each other. With some segment1 of the population not
| being able to tell the difference sooner than others, slowly
| reducing available budget of handmade media, increasing it's
| slop over time. Therefore progress in AI will reduce the
| quality of even handmade media.
|
| 1 https://pleated-jeans.com/2024/07/15/boomers-fooled-by-ai-
| fa...
| ssalka wrote:
| I think the headline is overly broad, especially considering:
|
| > As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all
| work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr.
| Thaler's copyright registration application listed the Creativity
| Machine as the work's sole author, even though the Creativity
| Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office
| appropriately denied Dr. Thaler's application.
|
| It seems like Dr. Thaler's argument was just weak, since
| generative AI works often _are_ authored in the first instance by
| a human being. For instance, any Midjourney or Stable Diffusion-
| generated image will be sourced from a prompt, which is typically
| written by a human. Anyone who has spent a little time trying to
| craft the perfect prompt knows there is a creative process
| therein that represents real work being done by a human.
| Similarly for img2img workflows, using a real photograph taken by
| a human. There, AI is only being used to transform a
| copyrightable input. Therefore such works - _though certainly not
| all AI works_ - should be eligible for copyright, IMO.
| creer wrote:
| Thaler seems to go out of his way to claim no human
| intervention and authorship by the AI - So yeah, that's a very
| specific ruling that has little to do with AI as a tool. It's
| really more about AI personhood.
|
| What's potentially more of a problem is the mention of artists
| using Midjourney and denied copyright - and very much separate
| cases from Thaler.
| jarsin wrote:
| The copyright office has already ruled recently that prompts
| are not enough to gain copyright no matter how detailed or how
| many iterations.
|
| _Furthermore, the Copyright Office stated that prompts alone
| do not provide sufficient human control, as AI models do not
| consistently follow instructions in the prompts and often "fill
| in the gaps" left by prompts and "generate multiple different
| outputs"_
| GrinningFool wrote:
| If I write a program to generate text of random words, that
| output can't be copyrighted -- but the program itself is.
|
| By the same token, the prompt is copyrighted - but not the
| output it generates.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The headline on Reuters seems to be more accurate (maybe it was
| changed after the article was posted here?). Unfortunately I
| can only got a glimpse of it before their overly-aggressive ad-
| blocker-blocker asserts itself (I'm fine with Reuters not
| wanting to serve me, since I block their ads, but their anti-
| adblocker system totally hijacks mobile safari).
| randomNumber7 wrote:
| You can click on "continue without supporting us".
| Leary wrote:
| So OpenAI's ChatGPT output cannot be copyrighted and it's legal
| to distill it?
| flowerlad wrote:
| Just because the output of the model cannot be copyrighted
| doesn't mean the model itself can't be copyrighted.
| kube-system wrote:
| No, the court did not say that AI output cannot be copyrighted.
| They said that a machine cannot hold the copyright.
| golemotron wrote:
| This is clearly a case where we need new legislation. The US
| Copyright Act needed to be amended to cover photography. Prior to
| that photos were not copyrightable. It seems like we are on the
| same trajectory now.
|
| The real problem is that Congress is institutionally incapable of
| making simple amendments to law. Everything gets delegated to
| agency rule making regardless of whether anyone likes the
| outcome.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| And then the supreme court tosses out the agency rulemaking.
| And then the president makes his own executive order. Then the
| courts block that. It's kind of a mess right now. Congress is
| pretty broken.
| golemotron wrote:
| No truer words have been said.
| kopecs wrote:
| Why do you think that? This obviously does not preclude
| copyright interests from existing in works which were generated
| using "AI" as a blanket rule; rather, this is about the fact
| that the applicant persistent in insisting that the _author of
| the work_ was an "autonomous[] computer algorithm".
|
| Do you think autonomous computer algorithms (to the extent we
| could suppose they exist, for the sake of argument) should have
| a statutory right to copyright?
| golemotron wrote:
| No, I just think that the space can be cleared up with
| legislation.
|
| It's a weird world where works created with a prompt are not
| creative enough for protection but pictures taken by randomly
| pointing smartphone cameras (which use significant amounts of
| AI internally, btw) are copyrightable.
| CaffeineLD50 wrote:
| Awesome!!!!
|
| I have trouble finding public domain pics & vids
| alistairSH wrote:
| Is there AI art that didn't involve human intervention? At
| minimum, somebody entered a prompt,right?
| elpocko wrote:
| At minimum, somebody pressed a button.
|
| You can generate AI art that doesn't involve a prompt, using
| only random noise and sampler settings as input. It's a good
| way to test for bias in the training material or overfitting
| for a specific style/type of content.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| There is so much IP discussion on here all the time, mostly
| trending, rationally, toward it being silly, harmful, benefiting
| the worst people. I just don't understand when this issue comes
| up we get this very specific intersection of the venn diagram
| where people are pro-IP, but only for AI art.
|
| Why is this anything other than a good thing? I just can't
| imagine people being starving artists with their medium being
| stable diffusion.. That's kind of a funny thought I guess, but
| doesn't this at the end of the day (perhaps symbolically) only
| further the possibilities and precedent around training models on
| all art? Because if their outputs aren't copywritable, who is
| going to care? Why is this anything other than a win? Who is the
| population harmed specifically with this ruling, actually?
| lxe wrote:
| Good. I think copyright law is in general bad. Nothing should be
| copyrighted.
| jarsin wrote:
| This is old news. The copyright office already ruled that AI
| generative outputs are not copyrightable in January [1].
|
| I think many have not understood the implications of the CO
| ruling. This means anything you build with llms you don't own.
| Your company doesn't own. If your using copilot and you have a
| copyright notice at the top of your source file if that ever goes
| to court you will learn that copyright is not valid. You cant
| even put an open source license on the output, like the GPL,
| because...drumroll...you don't own the copyright.
|
| [1] https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-
| Intell...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Note that this is a _deliberately_ extreme edge case, where the
| human involved claims that the work is completely AI authored,
| but wants a copyright anyway.
|
| The interesting cases will be the ones where the boundaries of
| copyrightability for works where a human claims copyright for
| works created using AI-assistance are hammered out.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| "U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-
| judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work
| to be authored in the first instance by a human being.""
|
| This is fantastic news. A unanimous decision, and the correct one
| in my view, means an appeal is fighting uphill.
|
| A minor victory but I hope it sends a chilling effect through the
| growing industry of AI generated music - copyright runs that
| industry with an iron fist. I hate the RIAA with a passion. I
| have never signed away my rights to 6StringMercenary and I reap
| the minor rewards. 10k Spotify streams is a small number for
| income purposes, but that's because the RIAA and Spotify colluded
| to give independent artists a fraction of the revenue to split
| among themselves.
|
| What a good, solid ruling for the protection of an already
| exploited class.
| squidsoup wrote:
| I understand the intent of this ruling, but it seems that real
| artists like Refik Adanol who trains his own models and produces
| work that I would consider to be uniquely his, are getting the
| short end of the stick here.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Yes, he can file a complaint next to Carolee Schneemann
| masterpiece Interior Scroll.
|
| This style of "art" is performative rather than expressive.
| Personally, I wouldn't commission either of them to clean my
| floor. =3
| dragonwriter wrote:
| They aren't getting _any_ end of the stick here, because this
| suit _does not address_ the boundary of claims of
| copyrightability of works with claimed human authorship using
| AI assistance.
| kube-system wrote:
| The title here is very misleading. They _didn 't_ say that if you
| use AI generation, you cannot claim copyright. They basically
| said "if you claim _not_ to have made something, then you don 't
| get copyright". That is a pretty obvious and sane conclusion.
|
| If you are stupid enough to go to a court and say "I didn't make
| this painting, the paintbrush did!", don't be surprised when they
| roll their eyes and say "well, your paintbrush isn't a human and
| therefore doesn't qualify".
| deadbabe wrote:
| Can someone just tell me: if I make an AI photo then do some
| tweaks in photoshop do I now have a copyright claim since I
| worked on this photo and it had no author?
|
| If I use the AI photo as a reference to make a painting by hand
| it's also my copyright since the original photo isn't owned?
| Habgdnv wrote:
| Is "Avatar" in the public domain now? I guess they just told a
| computer to simulate water, and no real creative work was done by
| humans?
| rjurney wrote:
| Well... that's one solution the the problem.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| That's not what it says, right? The ruling is that an AI cannot
| be assigned copyright ownership. That's very different than the
| claim of the headline that AI generated work cannot be
| copyrighted.
| cess11 wrote:
| If that holds in the most supreme court it would likely kill the
| effort from the entertainment industry to replace artists with
| machines, no?
|
| I don't really see the difference between asking Midjourney or
| whatever for an image, and asking my phone to fill a buffer from
| the camera sensors and fix that up into a "photograph".
| qwertox wrote:
| Would this mean that ILM / Pixar will be unable to copyright
| their AI-generated movies?
|
| Assume that they generate the entire movie in low poly count with
| flat shading, enough to properly prime an AI to generate
| incredible-looking movies. It simply cannot be true that they
| would lose the copyright to it just because they immersed it in
| AI.
| hintymad wrote:
| What about the series of really creative and complex prompts that
| an artist uses to create the AI-generated art? That is, the
| creativity and the associated values will be in the prompts.
| kemitchell wrote:
| The current Reuters headline is "US appeals court rejects
| copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator". That's
| still kind of clickbaity, but far more accurate and correct than
| the link I see here on HN.
|
| This whole case has been a dumb waste of time for anyone but
| scurrilous headline writers.
|
| The plaintiff insisted on filling out the copyright app with
| their "creation" in the author field. Every legal opinion since
| has had to start assuming that's true, making "no copyright for
| you" legally obvious. The plaintiff apparently tried to walk that
| back on appeal, to argue he authored the work using the software.
| There's a paragraph right near the beginning where the court
| points out it simply doesn't consider that argument, since it
| wasn't brought up to the Copyright Office, back when the
| plaintiff was insisting on the opposite.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Frivolous but sadly common. Someone need to nail down the legal
| language.
|
| As you can see here though, it's clearly not an unanimously
| obvious ruling though.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| All branches of government and the lower court has been
| consistent on this
|
| I think its a good trade! I've made a lot of money on AI
| generated works and it was never from selling or licensing the
| copyright
| imchillyb wrote:
| I think a deeper question to ask is:
|
| Can AI create at all?
|
| By our own human definitions of creation, does anything spit-out
| by LLM, ML, AI, have any merit as a created -thing-?
|
| Can the sum of what is learned by a model become more, and if so,
| can that create something? Anything?
| idonotknowwhy wrote:
| Holy shit, did they just make every photo taken from an iPhone
| (AI enhancement) public domain? And spellchecker for text?
|
| What about movies like Deadpool3, where AI wrote part of the
| script?
| api wrote:
| Ultimately I think AI models and their outputs should not be
| copyrightable unless they were only trained on data for which the
| trainer had appropriate rights (or was public domain) including
| the right to resell model results.
|
| These things are basically like JPEGs for knowledge and text. If
| I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from it. Of
| course since the trained model is a cumulative set of all inputs
| the rights are the set disjoint of the rights the trainer had on
| the data.
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