[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 : 719 points
Date : 2025-03-18 18:17 UTC (1 days 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:
| Perhaps. The argument here is that neither was done,
| however.
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| Thaler built a tool that spits out images and other stuff. He
| wants the AI to retain ownership, and for it to grant him a
| sublicense to him. Its bonkers.
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| My take on it...
|
| The models are not copyrightable, they are a derivative work
| of the collection of works that went into producing them as
| they are a mathematical transformation of that data.
|
| Related to the other famous example -
| https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf
|
| > The Office will not register works produced by nature,
| animals, or plants. Likewise the Office cannot register a
| work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings
| although the Office may register a work where the applicant
| or the deposit copy(its) state that the work was inspired by
| a divine spirit.
|
| > Examples:
|
| > * A photograph taken by a monkey.
|
| It then goes on...
|
| > Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a
| machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or
| automatically without any creative input or intervention from
| a human author.
|
| I believe that taking a bunch of photographs (or other works)
| and producing a model falls into that category of a machine
| or mechanical process that operates without creative input.
|
| _However_ I do also believe that a model is sufficiently
| transformative that it, in of itself, is not an
| infringement... and however again, the output of the model is
| not copyrightable itself and it may be infringing upon the
| works used to produce it.
| 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.
| vitiral wrote:
| It's amazing when laws make complete and consistent sense,
| +100 to this great answer
| 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.
| ourmandave wrote:
| To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th
| Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare =
| communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins
| are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People.
|
| So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money,
| it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI =
| Rembrandt.
| 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.
| spyder wrote:
| That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and
| mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| You might find that strange and disagree with it with a
| flawed analogy but I've merely reported the official
| stance of the US Copyright Office and legal precedents.
| See, for instance, this overview with further references:
|
| https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us
| -co...
|
| "Prompts Are Generally Insufficient to Make AI Output
| Copyrightable"
|
| If you don't trust this summary, read the US Copyright
| Office report for yourself. The gist of the position is
| that prompts are not specific enough and do not lead to
| deterministic output.
|
| On a side note, I find it weird that even on HN people
| automatically assume you're only expressing a personal
| opinion, yet in all fairness I should have included some
| references from the start.
| 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.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| We really need a human-human dispute where human A used AI
| to make a work and claims copyright and human B disputes
| the copyright. That's the kind of case that would get into
| the standards for necessary human input.
|
| Not sure if anything like that's been filed yet.
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| You also cannot train only on Warhol imagery, unless he
| drew billions of pics. So this is hypothetical "if". In
| reality you finetune an existing network based on a
| dataset much larger than Warhol's.
| 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?
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| Yeah, but this is legal loophole start
|
| how can you prove that this is my artwork not yours???
| 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.
| handoflixue wrote:
| The common people have always found it inconvenient.
|
| Pirated media routinely has a better user experience than
| otherwise. AO3 shows how powerfully people are drawn to
| fan-fiction (which still exists in a very legally grey
| area, despite the size of the community). I don't think a
| lot of people here support what happened to Aaron Swartz.
| "Information wants to be free".
|
| If it's also now inconvenient to the rich, I think one
| can reasonably ask who exactly is benefiting?
| 1659447091 wrote:
| > I think one can reasonably ask who exactly is
| benefiting?
|
| My guess would be the authors, photographers, etc. Many
| of who are not the rich but middle class. I would think
| if they did not benefit, none of this would even be an
| issue as they could release their work and waive the
| copyright-isn't that what the Creative Commons license is
| for? If copyright were forced on the author and they had
| no way to share their work freely, if they choose to do
| so, then that would be a problem, imo.
| fsflover wrote:
| This is not so simple:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476
| eastbound wrote:
| Copyright only exists to protect the rich. The lowlys
| don't make patents, they don't make money from their
| songs they put on Spotify, and they have to pay to watch
| movies.
|
| There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what
| would happen if copyright didn't exist (anarcho-
| something-capitalism, if I remember).
|
| For starters, industrial nations all raised when
| copyright wasn't a thing, including China in 1980-2020.
|
| You build wonders when you don't need to track who owns
| every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing,
| bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another,
| and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was
| totally strange that we used so much state resources,
| jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to
| the state related to preventing people from reusing each
| other's imaginary concepts.
| shagie wrote:
| It protects the photographs that I've taken _from_ the
| rich to be able to steal it and reproduce them much more
| cheaply than I can.
|
| It protects the open source contributions that I've made
| _from_ the rich, by being able to take them and hide them
| away in a product that doesn 't need to abide by the
| license enforced by copyright.
| 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.
| davely wrote:
| To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_
| be considered an artist's creative expression.
|
| I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome
| engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an
| artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his
| own tool, are the random splatters it generates not
| copyrightable?
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc
|
| [1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| >To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_
| be considered an artist's creative expression.
|
| Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for
| copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you
| own the copyright on the prompt.
|
| Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if
| you invited ten painters over to your house and read the
| prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting
| at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably
| produce the same picture suggests that you are not in
| control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have
| no claim to the copyright.
| blacksqr wrote:
| >a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be
| considered an artist's creative expression.
|
| Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end
| result.
|
| US copyright law specifically states that only works
| fixed into existence by a human author can be
| copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or
| procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be
| fixed.
| johnisgood wrote:
| In terms of AI, then it should be clear that the prompts
| (that AI used to generate my work) are my creative
| expressions. Sure, the AI may alter it in some unknown
| ways, but does this make it any less so my creative
| expression?
| elicksaur wrote:
| If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I
| hold the copyright because I own the camera?
|
| (No)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| "you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.
| californical wrote:
| Do "you choose" to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees
| to capture a bit of the sky? Or do "you choose" the
| moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There
| is always some creative decision involved by the person
| who presses the shutter
| sejje wrote:
| What if I ask a stranger to take my photo, and it turns
| out he's Ansel Adams?
|
| He's going to make some decisions about the framing etc,
| as one of the best photographers of all time.
| johnisgood wrote:
| So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them
| "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they
| do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am?
|
| Am I understanding you correctly?
| aziaziazi wrote:
| What if Louis XVI ask Antoine Callet to use a lighter
| color for his skin? Does he own the Callet painting
| copyright?
|
| You can prompt whatever you want but won't own the
| copyright. Photographer will choose himself if he follow
| or not your "prompt", what side and angle he tilt, the
| zoom, when to press the shutter...
| johnisgood wrote:
| What if I set a delay but it is not technically me who
| presses the key? Would that count because it was me who
| set the delay? What if I tell a friend to set the delay?
|
| All this is pretty much grey area anyways. Both sides
| have merit.
| I-M-S wrote:
| To me, it just shows how bogus the whole idea of
| copyright is.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Agreed.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I would not say bogus, I would just say it's a bit too
| easy to get copyright on a photograph.
|
| But it would be difficult to adjust that without making
| the rules even messier.
| sejje wrote:
| No, because I was asking.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I deliberately added:
|
| > but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I
| no longer am?
|
| We prompt the AI. I do not see how AI generated art
| cannot be copyrighted, TBH, but I am against copyright in
| general (or the way it is done abroad).
|
| Must read:
|
| https://mises.org/mises-daily/patents-and-copyrights-
| should-...
|
| https://fee.org/articles/mises-on-copyrights/
|
| TL;DR, FWIW:
|
| Mises supported intellectual property rights, including
| copyright, as a necessary legal tool in a free-market
| economy to incentivize creativity and innovation. He
| viewed intellectual property as a socially constructed
| right to protect creators' labor but cautioned against
| excessive or monopolistic extensions that could harm
| competition and economic efficiency.
|
| Rothbard opposed intellectual property rights, including
| copyright, as state-enforced monopolies that interfere
| with the free market. He argued that ideas, being non-
| rivalrous, cannot be owned like private property.
| Rothbard believed intellectual property could be
| protected through voluntary contracts, without state
| involvement, in a truly free market.
|
| To say on topic:
|
| Mises: Likely supports copyright for AI-generated art _if
| the human user contributes creatively_ (prompt,
| modifications).
|
| Rothbard: Opposes copyright for AI-generated art, as he
| believes intellectual property should be based on human
| labor and not state-enforced monopolies.
| freejazz wrote:
| There's plenty of jurisprudence on these issues for
| posters here to interact with, but in classic HN style,
| they will just keep pushing these arguments back and
| forth based on the headline for this one instance. People
| just want to play law, not actually interact with it.
| echelon wrote:
| Take out the second person and imagine if you set the
| camera to a timer.
|
| 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. Like we're making up the rules
| completely arbitrarily with no logic at all.
|
| At some level in many electronic systems there is some
| kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd
| be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine
| is responsible for making the content. No human is making
| quaternion calculations by hand, for instance.
|
| If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a
| human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody
| deserves copyright.
| dcow wrote:
| I believe the correct answer is "nobody deserves the
| copyright". It's a big fat myth that creatives would
| starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all
| the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who
| owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public,
| we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives
| housed and fed.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright
| protection.
| I-M-S wrote:
| The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a
| different way to compensate creatives for their talents
| should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.
| Goronmon wrote:
| "Just do something different that works better." is
| hardly an explicit statement.
| dcow wrote:
| No they really wouldn't. Companies and fans would
| commission art. We pay our damn food service staff on
| "would you like to pay a little extra today" tips method.
| Don't tell me, especially with zero justification, that
| creatives depend on the need to control who copies our
| society's ultimately culture. There are absolutely other
| ways and we're too scared to try them.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > Companies and fans would commission art.
|
| Why would they when they'd have every right to take it
| for free?
|
| Creative endeavours would be absolutely stillborn if only
| people wealthy enough to practice their craft could
| pursue the thing
| Ray20 wrote:
| Will there be any downsides?
| shagie wrote:
| Every bit of open source is founded on the license
| enforced by copyright and the ability for the creator to
| authorize the creation and distribution of derivative
| works.
|
| Without it, anything that is published could be taken
| (once the copyright has expired), repackaged in some user
| inaccessible way and resold.
|
| It is copyright that enforces the license of GPL. Without
| copyright, no license on creative work has any teeth.
| dcow wrote:
| The GPL is considered by its author to be a "hack" on the
| copyright system to perpetually enforce source
| availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive
| and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included.
| But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to
| fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we
| are.
|
| Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for
| the GPL in the first place. All knowledge should be
| public domain.
| shagie wrote:
| Removing copyright allows a company to take something
| that is in the public domain, make changes to it _and not
| release the changes_.
|
| Yes, the GPL is a hack on the distribution of derivative
| works... but without those teeth to bite with and
| enforce, then _nothing_ prevents one from taking some
| code that is not-copyrighted, making changes to it, and
| keeping the code to it completely in house while
| releasing it in a way that is not user modifiable.
|
| The ideals of the GPL (and AGPL) of sharing the
| contributions back to the community to further progress
| would be unenforceable and lost.
| 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.)
| oniony wrote:
| Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable
| work?
| Maken wrote:
| _- 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?_
|
| On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time
| that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief)
| direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have
| to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone
| and it's imposible to determine to which degree it was
| altered.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they
| took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away
| from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and
| their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile
| was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing
| forward.
|
| It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon
| photos.
| eloisius wrote:
| To some degree it wouldn't be hard to do non-destructive
| editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the
| developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal
| for digital cameras when shooting RAW.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| This has sort of already happened. There was a fair bit
| of fuss around a very similar topic during the Kyle
| Rittenhouse trial. The prosecution were not allowed to
| zoom in on drone footage because the defence successfully
| argued that zooming in results in the creation of
| information through interpolation which was not there in
| the original recording.
| therealpygon wrote:
| In short, in situation 1 there is no issue. In situation
| 2, if the original image can be copyrighted, AI tooling
| to augment the image doesn't prevent copyright. The
| copyright offices guidance on the subject is a worthwhile
| read, since they detail out the difference between using
| AI as a tool to modify human authorship, vs the AI taking
| minimal input alone and generating a resulting image.
| nightski wrote:
| "Minimal input" like pushing a button on a camera? Seems
| to me that is more minimal than some of the elaborate
| prompting it takes to get AI to output a desired image.
| bmicraft wrote:
| I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected
| then the image would be too?
| brewtide wrote:
| Gotta be 1,000 words.
| kadoban wrote:
| > Gotta be 1,000 words.
|
| What? Why? There's poems and stories shorter than that
| that must be copyrightable.
| ben_w wrote:
| There's a saying, "a picture is worth a thousand words".
|
| Regarding poetry, while I share your sentiment, what I
| notice in these discussions is that the emotional
| response to "done by AI" vs. "done by human" (or, on
| other forums, "done by furry") counts for a lot.
| bredren wrote:
| It goes away beyond this. You can create your own custom
| Lora. The tags that go into that, combined with prompting
| is sophisticated authorship.
|
| It can be reasonably be considered technical than
| handling a professional camera.
| thatcat wrote:
| What if the ai augments the shutter timing because you
| were shaking? The ai monkey pressed the shutter so no
| copyright I guess? Pretty sure several apps do this on
| night photo mode.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| Then I would assume it'd be treated as a tool in the
| creative process, similarly to a ruler helping you draw a
| straight line, but the author is still the human.
|
| But they say when you assume you make an ass out of you
| and me, and we all know the law is an ass, so who knows.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > - 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?
|
| The number 5 is not copyrightable, but if I take your
| short story and replace every space with the number 5
| it's still subject to the original copyright.
| bredren wrote:
| This is already essentially in iOS. In Photos edit mode,
| there is a Clean Up tool.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| There's a startup doing something close to this. I can't
| remember the name and I'm not going to look it up, but
| the pitch is that you feed it a copyright stock image and
| it uses AI to create a usable-but-clearly-different near
| equivalent - a situation where absence of copyright is a
| feature, not a bug.
|
| Technically it's a derivative work. Practically you'd
| never tell, and proof of derivation is impossible.
|
| The law as it currently stands is completely unable to
| deal with these issues.
|
| It's not even clear what the issues are, because
| copyright is primarily about protecting income rights
| from significant original invention. The mechanical act
| of making a copy is somewhat incidental.
|
| When invention is mechanised (or if you want to be less
| charitable, replaced by algorithmic grey goo) the
| definition of "significant original invention" either
| needs to be tightened up or replaced.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| You better be willing to question whether photographs can
| be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of
| several mechanical systems not created by the camera
| operator.
|
| Just limiting yourself to only "digital computation"
| being magical enough to invalidate copyright is an
| arbitrary restriction. Unless you clarify why you think
| the computation performed by the lens system doesn't have
| that property, further discussion seems pointless because
| it will just collapse to a circular "digital computation
| is magical enough", which is your implied premise.
| nerdponx wrote:
| By that logic, paintings aren't copyrightable either
| because of all the chemistry involved in drying pigment.
| cess11 wrote:
| The limits of copyright are intrinsically arbitrary,
| since the right has its foundations in fantasy, i.e.
| supposed spiritual labour. An extension of the idea that
| your physical labour gives you property rights to the
| fruits of it, into the religious realm of the soul.
| freejazz wrote:
| Why would anyone need to question whether photographs can
| be copyrighted at all? It's been settled jurisprudence
| for quite a long time.
| CYR1X wrote:
| The other aspect here is you can't copyright an
| observable truth. For instance, sports companies tried to
| sue other sports companies for scraping their scores
| feeds but courts ruled you can't copyright the fact
| Patriots beat the Falcons 35-30, because that's simply
| what happened. There isn't any proprietary scoring
| keeping mechanism. Anyone who observed the game also can
| determine those numbers. It is an observable truth. So
| maybe that applies to the raw photo. You are simply
| capturing what happened from that POV at that moment in
| time. Sure if you do something with that photo, then it
| may become more than an observable truth.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >You better be willing to question whether photographs
| can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result
| of several mechanical systems not created by the camera
| operator.
|
| That is a good point that a lot of people don't want to
| address. A lot of the 'creative' part of the process is
| actually being done by the software in the camera.
| chii wrote:
| > Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a
| photo of you using your phone in a tourist location?
|
| because you asked and they complied, there's a work
| contract between said photo-button presser and you. The
| implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the
| photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks
| from you.
|
| Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a
| stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and
| pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the
| copyright.
| fnord123 wrote:
| > Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and
| a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and
| pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the
| copyright.
|
| If they've performed an Unauthorized Access to a Computer
| System then they may want to drop any copyright claim.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Precisely.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > because you asked and they complied, there's a work
| contract between said photo-button presser and you
|
| No, this can't happen, because there is no consideration.
|
| > and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you
|
| Nope. You can call it consideration, but that won't make
| it consideration.
| chii wrote:
| consideration doesnt have to be money.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| No, but it does have to exist. A private word of thanks
| isn't enough to even rise to that level.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > because you asked and they complied, there's a work
| contract between said photo-button presser and you.
|
| That's not how contract law works.
|
| > The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to
| the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks
| from you.
|
| Even if there was an otherwise valid contract, with this
| as an implicit term, you can't transfer copyright
| ownership from the actual author by implicit agreement:
| "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by
| operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of
| conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is
| in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed
| or such owner's duly authorized agent." (17 USC Sec. 204)
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some
| buildings and art installations are copyrighted which
| means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-
| private usage despite being literally out in the open for
| everyone to see [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-
| urh...
| shagie wrote:
| This is country specific (as is copyright itself). https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t...
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120
|
| > The copyright in an architectural work that has been
| constructed does not include the right to prevent the
| making, distributing, or public display of pictures,
| paintings, photographs, or other pictorial
| representations of the work, if the building in which the
| work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from
| a public place.
|
| This gets further complicated by sculptural works that
| are not part of the architecture of the building which
| have their own copyright. For example, the sculpture of
| lions in front of the New York Public Library are works
| of sculpture and not part of the architecture of the
| building and so photographs of them are derivative
| works... though that's not an issue now as they've fallen
| into public domain (they were the example given when I
| started photography as a sculpture that was often
| photographed along with architecture)... but are
| trademarked.
|
| Then you get things like the Eiffel Tower which is public
| domain, but the lights (installed in 1985) are not... so
| a photograph of it, by night, is under copyright.
|
| It's complicated.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yup, that's insane, all of it. Anything that is visible
| with the human eye or a reasonable camera (i.e. no 1200mm
| superzoom into someone's residence where a painting
| hangs) from the open street or any area accessible to the
| general public such as parking lots, airports and the
| likes should be freely redistributable.
| Suppafly wrote:
| > in Germany, some buildings and art installations are
| copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be
| photographed for non-private usage despite being
| literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].
|
| I think most people agree that that is ridiculous. I'm
| not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with
| Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and
| moral ownership and such.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how they manage to enforce that, even with
| Europe's generally strong ideas around copyright and
| moral ownership and such.
|
| Copyright holders use Google's reverse image search to
| find anyone who posts such photos to Twitter, Facebook or
| whatever, and then file civil damage claims.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| Who owns your photo of the moon after Samsung uses
| "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/A
| ndroid/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
| bacchusracine wrote:
| Burger King.
| mubou wrote:
| Wow, that last "photo" is especially damning.
|
| I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with
| a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them
| somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just
| ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and
| retake...
|
| (I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to
| develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have
| to. Some phones' RAWs are actually post-filtering, too,
| and not actually "raw".)
| thewebguyd wrote:
| They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are
| so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty
| much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light.
| The only way at this point to improve photo quality out
| of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far,
| everyone has chosen doing it in software.
|
| Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount
| of post processing, some is always going to be necessary
| if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.
| mubou wrote:
| I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for
| photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the
| time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-
| shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it
| feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025;
| you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.
| wooger wrote:
| Because you also want the lens, which is exactly what
| doesn't fit on a phone form factor
| SR2Z wrote:
| We've had removable lenses forever. Is it really an
| impossible engineering challenge to ship a phone with a
| low-profile swappable lens?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Anything software on the phone can do, software on the
| desktop could do. So I still want the raw image as an
| option.
| CYR1X wrote:
| Oh shit. Who owns your photo if your phone does any
| amount of software-based manipulation to it? Like making
| faces look better?? Is this how google claims it can use
| all of your pixel photos in its AI training?
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a
| photo of you using your phone in a tourist location?
|
| Wouldn't that be a 'work for hire' situation?
| 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
| anon743448 wrote:
| As sibling comment said, this is not correct.
|
| In wedding and portrait photography, many clients think
| that they own copyrights to the photos but they don't and
| sometimes get in trouble for violating photographers'
| copyrights.
| Karliss wrote:
| One more example demonstrating the opposite - in EU the
| copyright law explicitly states that transferable
| copyrights for software get automatically transferred
| from employees to the company. Which suggests that for
| other types of copyrightable works and author/customer
| relationships it doesn't happen automatically.
| CBarkleyU wrote:
| Do you happen to have more reading material on said law?
|
| In Germany, you can't even transfer copyright. So yeah,
| anything you create that reaches the threshold of having
| a copyright, you own the copyright. Even as an employee.
|
| At the same time, you might not own the usage rights
| (Nutzungsrechte/Verwertungsrechte).
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| AI agents will exist some day, and almost certainly some
| will be granted personhood status.
| Timwi wrote:
| "Some day", sure, but as we know the granting of
| personhood status doesn't formally happen until 2365,
| when Phillipa Louvois rules in the Brian Maddox case. And
| despite the success of that ruling, it still doesn't
| fully apply to all AI agents (e.g. the EMH Mk 1).
| 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.
| buzer wrote:
| > In Germany at least, code written by AI is not
| copyrightable
|
| > 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.
|
| How far does that extend? Like would IntelliSense cause
| your code to not be copyrightable? It's not that
| different from AI autocomplete on principal level. It
| shows you some options, but you make the final decision
| what to use.
|
| And what about binaries? These days there are not many
| people who could tell the exact binary that is produced
| by certain source code.
| tpm wrote:
| IANAL, but the distinction is whether you are using the
| tool as a tool, in which case the code is still your
| creation, vs. the tool is the creator - and in this case
| I have to refer to a German definition as it was given to
| me - Geistiger Schopfer (lit. spiritual creator), here
| [0] they define it as "An agent who is responsible for
| creating a work". Clearly this is something that would
| have to be decided by courts in some cases.
|
| [0] https://sta.dnb.de/doc/RDA-E-W135
| Karliss wrote:
| That doesn't seem right. While I agree that not being
| able to copyright AI generated commercial code is
| problematic and reason for avoiding it, the need to
| transfer all rights to customer doesn't seem like one of
| them.
|
| Following your logic you couldn't use any third party
| library open source or not since you don't own copyrights
| to them either. Can't even use an existing compiler since
| parts of standard library will be embedded in it's
| output.
|
| I assume what's actually intended in such cases is
| transferring all the rights necessary so that customer
| can afterwards do whatever they want with software
| without your permission, including making modifications,
| hiring someone else to further maintain it or even
| reselling it. It can still be a valid requirement not to
| depend on any commercial libraries which require
| temporary licensing or otherwise restrict customers
| ability to do what they want with combined software. Same
| applies for open source libraries with restrictive
| license (especially stuff like GPL).
|
| When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you and
| you custom have full rights to copy and distribute those
| parts of software as do everyone else, you just don't own
| exclusive rights (copyrights) to control whether and how
| anyone else can also copy those parts of software. Do you
| own copyright for number "10", does it mean you can't use
| it in your software.
|
| The potentially problematic part is when you are trying
| to sell a commercial product and someone "pirates" it. If
| it's not copyrightable there is no piracy. In practice
| even largely AI generated software will contain some
| copyrightable parts, but the enforcement will probably
| still get a lot messier and no legal team wants that. In
| theory some could only copy the non-copyrightable parts
| and substitute the parts which weren't AI generated.
| tpm wrote:
| > When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you
| and you custom have full rights to copy and distribute
| those parts of software as do everyone else, you just
| don't own exclusive rights (copyrights) to control
| whether and how anyone else can also copy those parts of
| software. Do you own copyright for number "10", does it
| mean you can't use it in your software.
|
| Yes. It can be an issue depending of the wording of your
| agreement with the customer. For example, if 'you' agreed
| to develop a piece of software 'exclusively' for the
| customer, and then use AI to create substantial parts of
| the software, then neither it was 'you' who developed
| that, nor was it 'exclusively' for the customer as you
| can't grant exclusivity.
| DougBTX wrote:
| > For example, if 'you' agreed to develop a piece of
| software 'exclusively' for the customer, and then use AI
| to create substantial parts of the software, then neither
| it was 'you' who developed that, nor was it 'exclusively'
| for the customer
|
| On the other hand, if 'you' had taken no action at all,
| then there would be no software at all. The actions by
| 'you' are necessary for the software to exist, so the
| argument must be about whether those actions count as
| development or not. Is the definition of development
| written down anywhere?
| tpm wrote:
| > Is the definition of development written down anywhere?
|
| I think it is, but I'm not a German lawyer, so I'll just
| link what I did in another comment - it revolves around
| the question who is the Geistiger Schopfer (lit.
| spiritual creator) https://sta.dnb.de/doc/RDA-E-W135
| freejazz wrote:
| >The actions by 'you' are necessary for the software to
| exist, so the argument must be about whether those
| actions count as development or not.
|
| Definition? Yes, but it's required over a hundred years
| of jurisprudence to apply it to different scenarios, in
| the US at least. It's amusing that you think the
| definition would clear things up.
| 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:
| Compiled byte code is a derivative work of the original
| source code. Copyright extends to derivative works.
| sahila wrote:
| Wouldn't AI generated art be derivative work done by
| Google (or whoever) when creating their Gemini models? So
| then Google owns all gemini created ai artwork?
| Aloisius wrote:
| 1. Model weights may not be copyrightable.
|
| 2. Copyright protects _copying_. Expressive elements from
| the original creative work (source code) exist in the
| byte code, thus it remains under the original copyright.
|
| 3. For a derivative work to be considered a newly
| copyrightable work (as opposed to a copy subject to the
| original's copyright), it must contain new substantive
| human creative expression (whether the original creator
| also has a copyright claim as well depends on degree of
| transformation).
| freejazz wrote:
| Typically you need the permission of a copyright owner to
| create derivatives of their work.
| bb88 wrote:
| But if I copyright the prompt to the input of the AI,
| does that not also become a derivative work?
|
| I do believe in the US (I could be wrong) that copyright
| does exist without registering it with the US government.
| freejazz wrote:
| You think this ruling on photography is wrong because of
| a strained comparison to AI use in a compiler? Take a
| step back and rethink your approach. The copyright office
| here is dealing with fundamental principles, not worrying
| about what the impacts will be to the use of compilers.
| 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.
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| You're missing the point of that comment.
| pests wrote:
| On a re-read yeah perhaps I did.
| 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)
| Tadpole9181 wrote:
| Then a machine took the photo and it can't be
| copyrighted, apparently. These rules are totally
| arbitrary.
| sejje wrote:
| The machine took the photo either way, in fact. Whether
| you press the instant shutter button, or delayed one. And
| the film is what responds to the scene.
|
| It seems almost directly analogous to asking the AI for
| an image that you imagine.
| I-M-S wrote:
| _All_ rules are totally arbitrary and commanded by those
| holding the power to their benefit.
| 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.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| They do a have a legal obligation though. Otherwise
| chores would be unpaid child labor.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do
| the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc.
|
| this is outlandish bullshit
| 627467 wrote:
| https://www.businessinsider.com/why-damien-hirst-is-
| controve...
|
| > There are nearly 1,400 of Damien Hirst's "spot"
| paintings in existence.
|
| > The artist has only painted around 25 of them himself.
| samlinnfer wrote:
| All the classic masters have workshops, where they have
| students or assistants that complete a rough cut of their
| work and they finish it.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| You might be shocked to discover that this has been a
| thing for hundreds of years.
| 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?
| manwe150 wrote:
| I think my understand is that because the work itself is
| already covered by different laws (eg trespassing), you
| had the opportunity to make a verbal contract with the
| person who took the photo. And the same in reverse:
| because they used your camera, they implicitly agreed for
| you to have the right to that copy of their work. If they
| didn't get the copyright automatically, then they
| wouldn't be able to assign it to you as a condition of
| being present, leading to other potential legal
| complications where works could be created but where
| nobody holds the right to assign them to someone else,
| since nobody was 100% responsible for the creativity that
| generated it
| heywoods wrote:
| Assuming I read this right, and that's a big assumption,
| do I have this.. right? The guy in my hypothetical below
| knows the copyright law and is making a legal request.
|
| _guy is walking by family and is asked to take their
| photo_
|
| _guy takes photo_
|
| _same guy asks for a copy of the family photo_
|
| _awkwardness intensifies_
|
| ---------
|
| I really liked what you wrote and appreciate your
| knowledge you brought to the thread, but what I really
| loved about reading your comment was the deeper and
| deeper you took us into the weeds of law the stranger and
| further divorced from reality it feels. Maybe that's just
| me?
| manwe150 wrote:
| I think that depends what you mean by legal request. The
| guy is not making a request of the legal system, so no,
| it is not specifically a legal request in that sense.
| However, if someone did make a legal request later, the
| testimony of this exchange might be introduced as
| evidence that they had a entered into a contractual
| agreement verbally to give the guy a right to have a copy
| of the photo for his private use. (Remember that the
| family also have a legal right to their own likeness,
| though it is a privacy law, not copyright, so there are
| multiple dimensions here as to who has the initial rights
| in the interaction). Replace "family" with "celebrity"
| and I think you'd have a plausible scenario that might
| end up in court on occasion.
| freejazz wrote:
| It isn't necessarily one or the other, it depends on
| numerous factors. Works can be made for hire as one
| example. Annie Liebowitz still is the author of a
| photograph even if she has her assistant pull the
| shutter. You might even be surprised to realize that is
| an incredibly common occurrence in professional studio
| photography. Everyone in this thread is searching for one
| really quick answer to apply to all situations and it
| does not work that way. The courts look at a number of
| factors to make these determinations.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the
| copyright for all the footage they took for studios.
|
| Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...
| andrewxdiamond wrote:
| Well no, because they are employees / contractors of the
| film studio, who presumably claim all copyright of what
| they captured.
|
| However, the camera operators likely do own the pictures
| they take with their own cameras on-set, provided the
| contract they are working under allows for such ownership
| frankus wrote:
| In that case there's going to be a pre-existing work-for-
| hire agreement where the camera operator assigns
| copyright to the studio.
| creer wrote:
| Perhaps the people who do photography and filming for a
| business have thought of it. So, yes, but there are of
| course multiple ways to work with a team (or in a team of
| two - not to be the one pressing the shutter and still
| being the one owning the copyright.)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Hollywood camera operators are in a union with a
| contract. They are working for hire, and have no claim
| beyond their contract.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| no, because Hollywood in 100 years has already evolved
| through every possible lying weasel lawsuit you or others
| here could imagine.. and yet humans continue to dream,
| write, paint and act. Single-line gotcha's are not new,
| hold no weight, produce very little that is constructive
| IMHO
| itronitron wrote:
| What happens if you ask "the guy" to paint a picture of
| mickey mouse?
| NewJazz wrote:
| You can't just replace monkeys with humans when the legal
| system doesn't treat them as the same class of organism.
| ehnto wrote:
| It's clear "the guy" did the majority of the creative work,
| so whilst it's "not difficult to understand" the law, it is
| a nuanced situation. Pretending it is not because of the
| letter of the law is just sidestepping the conversation we
| are trying to have.
| tantalor wrote:
| This is a very good point.
|
| For example, consider a photograph of a painting. The
| photographer owns the copyright to the photo, but the
| artist retains copyright over the painting contained
| within the photo, which is derivative of the original
| artwork.
|
| It is less obvious that simply setting up a scene and
| camera where anybody (including a monkey) can use it
| meets that threshold for an original work. After all, the
| scene was outdoors and completely natural.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce.
| Yet I'm the one writing the code.
| andirk wrote:
| Yup. Because we agreed to that up front to "transfer
| ownership" or some jargon. Otherwise yes it is yours.
| johnisgood wrote:
| But what if I made "that guy" to take the photo, just like
| I "made" (prompted) AI?
| concordDance wrote:
| In cases like this it's best to ask why we have copyright
| law in the first place. Do we feel the supply of such
| photos is naturally lower then we'd like to such an extent
| that we'd grant a legally enforced monopoly on its
| distribution?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yes it is in fact difficult and nuanced. The act of
| pressing the shutter button does not create copyright. The
| creative work done to make the photograph possible does.
| donatj wrote:
| Who owns the copyright to the footage of a motion triggered
| security camera? The person breaking in?
|
| Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?
|
| It seems pretty reasonable that copyright should lay with
| the entity that had the actual _intention_ on creating a
| work. Not whatever force happened to trigger it.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?
|
| i think a lot of us would be ok with that, so that's not
| the showstopper argument you might this it is.
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pd
| f
|
| Section 313.2
|
| The copyright office said that photographs taken by monkeys
| nor murals painted by elephants are works that may be
| copyrighted. This is based on Burrow-Giles Lithography vs
| Sarony (
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/111/53 )
|
| The issue is that the photographer / owner of the camera
| didn't exercise any creative control over the photograph.
|
| > On 22 August 2014, the day after the US Copyright Office
| published their opinion, a spokesperson for the UK
| Intellectual Property Office was quoted as saying that,
| while animals cannot own copyright under UK law, "the
| question as to whether the photographer owns copyright is
| more complex. It depends on whether the photographer has
| made a creative contribution to the work and this is a
| decision which must be made by the courts."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispu
| t...
|
| And this is a "it's complicated" and further complicated by
| the difference in threshold of originality with US law and
| sweat of the brow for UK law.
| kube-system wrote:
| Right, it hinges on the creativity of the human author.
| And there's a lot more to creativity of photography than
| simply pushing a button.
|
| Obviously, routine and ordinary photographs taken by a
| photographer on a timer are not disqualified just because
| a machine pushed the button.
|
| I am not saying that anything with a monkey qualifies, my
| point is that the involvement of a monkey is not
| disqualifying.
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| From his blog in 2011 [1].
|
| > I put my camera on a tripod with a very wide angle
| lens, settings configured such as predictive autofocus,
| motorwind, even a flashgun, to give me a chance of a
| facial close up if they were to approach again for a
| play. I duly moved away and bingo, they moved in,
| fingering the toy, pressing the buttons and fingering the
| lens.
|
| > ...
|
| > They played with the camera until of course some images
| were inevitably taken!
|
| Afaik, he has never taken the position that the monkey
| did any more work besides just hitting the button. He
| just didn't contest news articles overly stating the role
| of the monkey. There's also a significant amount of
| photos taken definitely by him on the same blog post so
| it's not like the purpose of the blog post is the monkey
| photo.
|
| [1]: http://www.djsphotography.co.uk/Tropical%20Forests/S
| ulawesi%...
| SilasX wrote:
| It doesn't sound like you're disputing my core point,
| that he's
|
| - trying to benefit (financially) from the unrebutted
| presumption that the picture shows the monkey's self-
| awareness and understanding that it's taking a selfie
|
| while also
|
| - trying to benefit (in the courts) from the
| diametrically opposite position that the picture shows no
| such thing because of how staged it is.
|
| Thus, "trying to have it both ways".
|
| If your point is just that I shouldn't have represented
| the subtext of his marketing as an actual quote, while
| it's okay to do that for the argument he made in the
| courts ... sure, point conceded.
| 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.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| i'm filing this one under "intellectual property is dumb and
| bad" and leaning my entire body weight on the door of the
| filing cabinet to try and get it to close
| phire wrote:
| This case is confusing because there were actually three
| sides.
|
| Wikimedia (and others) were arguing that the image was in
| public domain because animals can't hold copyright. PETA were
| arguing that monkeys should be able to hold copyright. And
| the original "photographer" was arguing that he should own
| the copyright because he did everything except push the
| button.
|
| The only side that actually reached court was PETA, arguing
| the monkey should hold copyright. And the court promptly
| ruled against PETA. But that ruling doesn't say the image is
| public domain, it simply rules the monkey can't hold
| copyright.
|
| It wasn't even an interesting court case, copyright law is
| pretty clear that animals can't hold copyright. Nobody (other
| than PETA) really thought otherwise.
|
| If the original "photographer" actually went to court against
| the public domain camp, I do think they would have a decent
| chance of winning back the copyright to that image. But he
| never scrapped together enough funding for a lawsuit, so it
| hasn't gone to court.
| m463 wrote:
| What I can't believe is to funnel every student in school in
| front of the same photographer, have him/her press a button,
| and then it costs grandma $110 for an 8x10 and two wallet-
| sized photos.
| TOMDM wrote:
| If only he had wired up the shutter to an AND gate, one for
| the monkey and one for him.
|
| Since the monkey can't contribute he'd be the sole owner for
| holding down half of the button.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| Consider these (rhetorical, I am not sure I'm up for the
| nuanced debate given IANAL) questions:
|
| 1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The
| artist, or the commissioner? Which rights?
|
| 2. What about derived works of art made with or without the
| permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned
| into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling
| Stones wrote _Sympathy For the Devil_ , did the estate of
| Mikhail Bulgakov have a right to feel aggrieved, and should
| they have received royalties?
|
| 3. What rights can be assigned/transferred, and what rights
| can't be? What needs to happen for that process to be legally
| binding?
|
| 4. Is a monkey capable of being a willing participant in a
| photograph, or a contract assigning rights in any way?
|
| 5. Same question, but for a machine? What does it mean for an
| AI to assign rights, or assert moral rights?
|
| 5. If the law makes it clear that a legal party to a statute
| (law), or contract must be a human or other legal subject (an
| incorporated business), can those laws and contracts lawfully
| apply to an animal or machine?
|
| 6. What is the _intent_ of intellectual property law? Many
| argue it is mostly civil law, that follows the spirit of
| civil law in striving towards _fairness_?
|
| We can argue if intellectual property law implementation is
| just, but your issue seems to be that the time invested in
| planning a creative act is the central tenet on which a
| copyright protection should be determined.
|
| If so, Picasso was wrong to argue that his quick sketch on a
| napkin took him "a lifetime" to create, and your argument is
| just and correct. I disagree.
|
| Regardless, what do you think the law is attempting to
| actually protect which is not "time taken to plan and create
| the work"?
|
| Note when thinking about these questions it might be helpful
| to remember that ownership, copyright and moral rights are
| not all equivalent things in law.
| blacksqr wrote:
| In the USA:
|
| 1. The artist owns the copyright.
|
| 2. Derived works without permission of the author are
| illegal, unless under specific exemptions like fair use.
| The author of a book made into a film continues to own
| their words, the filmmakers own their original creative
| contributions to the work. Concepts and themes can't be
| copyrighted, so unless the Stones quoted Bulgakov's words
| verbatim, his estate would have no claim.
|
| 3. "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in
| whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation
| of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal
| property by the applicable laws of intestate succession."
|
| 4. You'd have to ask the monkey. No.
|
| 5. Copyright law only applies to people, so there is no
| meaning to those concepts.
|
| 5-2. Animals and machines are considered property, so
| property law is applied to them.
|
| 6. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by
| securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the
| exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
| Discoveries"
| pndy wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a
| new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos
| taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to
| "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it,
| exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these
| photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased,
| and/or one which provided the alrogithms
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| Copyright is actually really easy to understand:
|
| > Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the
| copyright?
|
| Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright
|
| > Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual
| consumer?
|
| Copyright does not apply, how dare you?
|
| Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you
| should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent
| DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I think part of it is that he made such a big deal about
| saying the monkey took his camera and took the photo, to drum
| up excitement about the whole thing, not realizing that the
| rest of the world would use that as an excuse to publish his
| photo without giving him credit for it. I'm not even sure the
| monkey actually took the photo itself, but the story that
| made the photo popular has been the story for so long that he
| can't walk it back now.
| 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.
| madmountaingoat wrote:
| I think this specific quote from the article deals with this
| situation.
|
| > _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."_
| 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.
| shagie wrote:
| I love Ted Orland's panorama photographs -
| https://www.anseladams.com/products/tree-in-snowstorm-
| yosemi... and https://www.freestylephoto.com/making-
| holga-panoramas
|
| While he shoots with the cheapest of toy cameras, he is
| _very_ skilled.
|
| > 1966, Ted enrolled in as a fledgling photographer in
| Ansel Adams' Yosemite Photography Workshop --an event
| which markedly changed the course of his artistic life.
| He returned to Yosemite as Ansel's workshop assistant the
| following year, and in 1970 moved to Carmel to work
| fulltime as Ansel's Assistant and printer of Adams'
| Yosemite Special Edition Prints. Ted also returned for
| fifteen seasons as an Instructor at Ansel's Yosemite
| Workshops.
| 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?
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Maybe.
|
| There's a technical aspect around camera and photo
| settings. This is largely objective. In certain
| conditions, certain settings deliver certain qualities.
|
| Then, there's a subjective side. Framing, composition,
| other artistic decisions.
| 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?
| aydyn wrote:
| On top of that "level of effort" is obviously very
| subjective.
| wruza wrote:
| It's just a new phenomenon that you can get a relatively
| sophisticated result from a short sentence. But the
| amount of efforts or iterations doesn't condition
| anything here.
| 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.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| But that's make believe. In the real world people scoff at
| it like the parent comment.
| 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?
| Aloisius wrote:
| An employment contract where you agree to assign
| copyrights to them for any works you create doesn't make
| _uncopyrightable_ works you create somehow become
| copyrightable.
| falcor84 wrote:
| > ... uncopyrightable works you create ..
|
| But there's the rub, right? If "you create" it, then it
| is copyrightable - so what is it that _is_ this act of
| creation?
|
| As posed elsewhere in this thread mentioned, how come
| taking out my phone and pressing the camera button with
| no authorial intent whatsoever is considered to be
| creative, whereas setting up a camera in a particular
| location and fully determining its settings, but letting
| an animal depress the button is considered to not be
| creative?
|
| Part of the reason that this is on my mind is that I
| recently watched "Flash of Genius" [0] and found the
| legal arguments there about what merits an invention
| versus being obvious entirely silly. Essentially the
| movie (and my experience) shows that it all boils down to
| who has more time and money to spend on the legal system.
| I'm not saying that I have a clear solution myself, but I
| would really love to have something that is more than
| just "I know it when I see it".
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054588/
| Aloisius wrote:
| _> If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable_
|
| No. Not everything people create is copyrightable.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
| 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.
| jazzcomputer wrote:
| With image AI there are structural editing tools that can
| include the creator drawing guide images. I think there's a
| point at which this makes things a bit more like collage of
| found media, and I believe this is more of an authored
| creation when compared to Richard Prince's using someone
| else's Instagram selfie and repurposing that as his art by
| adding a comment to it and screen-grabbing it. What is and
| isn't art is sometimes to me, clearer than copyright
| ownership and sometimes vice-versa.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/30/8691257/richard-prince-
| in...
| chimprich wrote:
| > what we have right now are LLMs, not AI
|
| LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for
| over 70 years.
|
| Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| They are inspired though, not derivative. AI models contain
| no source data in a reproducible form (not that it really
| matters, but in case it is, they can't).
| 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.
| wruza wrote:
| It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won't claim
| where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction
| makes less sense than needed for important definitions.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Software does not get inspired
| 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.
| creer wrote:
| > If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited
| to me, not them, though I might also credit them.
|
| You can do what you want. But only legally so if their
| contract says so.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| If AI _could_ hold copyright I 'd be more worried about
| automation.
|
| In similar fashion to this:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| > 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.
|
| I agree with your statement up to this point. I think there's a
| very murky area here specifically with AI because it was
| trained on works that the "author" (prompter) is not privy to
| on copyright. So I don't think that it immediately or
| necessarily follows that this kind of human intervention is
| copyrightable.
|
| For specific AI tooling like image enhancers running on your
| phone that were not trained on any copyrightable material this
| makes sense though.
| johnisgood wrote:
| > without human intervention
|
| There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI.
| Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in
| the first place.
| silon42 wrote:
| IMO, the prompt is more clearly copyrightable than the output
| image... which is also the derived work of all the training
| data.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I agree, but what if we account for
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936?
|
| Mainly:
|
| > Humans derive their ideas from impressions (sensory
| experiences, or in terms of AI, the training model) and the
| ideas they form are essentially recombinations or
| refinements of those impressions. In this sense, human
| creativity can be viewed as a process of combining,
| transforming, and reinterpreting past experiences
| (impressions).
|
| We humans do it all the time, TBH.
|
| By this logic or view, nothing can be copyrighted.
|
| I don't know, it is all so shady and a grey area.
| Riverheart wrote:
| Copyright is a human construct designed to benefit
| humans. It doesn't matter if the process is the same. AI
| doesn't need to put food on the table, doesn't pay taxes,
| and will never die. There is no reason to treat it the
| same because it's different in all other ways that matter
| in society.
| johnisgood wrote:
| So can I claim copyright for AI-generated art?
| verisimi wrote:
| > What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder?
|
| Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server
| is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty
| ought to be deferred. /s
| ratedgene wrote:
| This is interesting. So is anything generated by AI not
| copyrightable?
| droideqa wrote:
| Could a corporation be the author of a picture? Corporations
| have all the rights of people in the USA, right?
|
| I always wondered why we don't just let AIs run corporations
| and therefore give them personhood rights.
| disqard wrote:
| An LLM could definitely output the boilerplate communications
| that CEOs emit.
| blacksqr wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that
| a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed
| into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing
| itself that makes an item copyrightable.
|
| The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which
| a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright
| protection.
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
| 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.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Well you do if someone rejects a copyright claim on the
| grounds that the image is AI-generated, and a court backs
| them up.
| kube-system wrote:
| The court did not say AI generated images are not
| eligible for copyright. They said machines cannot be
| assigned copyrights. That's because only humans are
| eligible.
|
| If you are a human who creatively uses a tool to generate
| something, you'd get copyright protection.
| 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
| visarga wrote:
| There are over 200K language modeling datasets on Hugging
| Face, I bet a large portion of them were generated with
| LLMs, and all LLMs to date have been trained on
| copyrighted data. So they are all tainted.
|
| But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block
| that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright.
| It does not carry the expression, but borrows
| abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed.
|
| If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be
| accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions
| learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible.
|
| On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will
| never regurgitate the originals because they never saw
| them.
| 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
| intrasight wrote:
| The AI will do that - for a price.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Not if it was trained on that copyrighted code; the
| copyright "survives" the training process, legally-
| speaking, just as it does if you hear a song, and then
| output (even truly accidentally) the exact same song and
| claim it as your own.
|
| If you can perfectly prove that no copyrighted code was
| used in training a model _and_ that the model was not
| algorithmically _designed_ to output that code, based on
| knowledge of the copyrighted code on the creator 's part,
| but it outputs code identical to a copyrighted program, it
| could very likely not be infringement... but obviously
| that's a high bar to clear for a complex program.
|
| If your model always outputs
|
| > #!/bin/bash > echo "hello world"
|
| another programmer will likely not be able to claim
| copyright infringement on it. If it always outputs Adobe
| Photoshop, you're gonna need a _very_ good lawyer, and a
| Truman-show-esque mountain of evidence on your side.
| 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.
| blorkusmelorkus wrote:
| That's a good test. An artist working in oils can
| effectively create the same image over and over. An ai kind
| fails there.
| Aerroon wrote:
| As kids we did an art project where you mixed colors with
| some yoghurt-like substance. You drop it on the paper and
| then fold it. This created these beautiful arrangements of
| colors.
|
| Does this mean that those works are not copyrighted either
| since the kids didn't actually direct where each color
| goes? Every time you do this you'd get a substantially
| different picture too.
| connicpu wrote:
| I mean, these edge cases are very sensitive to the exact
| facts at hand. Even an experienced copyright lawyer can't
| give you a definitive answer until you go to trial.
| That's why I said you're vulnerable to the argument, not
| that you'll definitely lose the copyright.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| _Every time you do this you 'd get a substantially
| different picture_
|
| This is actually a bad example. It's too easy for an IP
| attorney to bring in an expert witness,(read: physicist),
| and blow it out of the water in a courtroom.
|
| I won't go into the details, but basically, you got
| different arrangements every time because the human did
| different things every time. In the case of generative
| AI, you get different arrangements every time when the
| human does the _exact same_ thing every time.
|
| So, if you can find it, the counterexample you're looking
| for is one where the human does the _exact same_ thing
| every time. (In an unassailable mathematical and physics
| based sense of the word "same"). But gets different
| results.
| sejje wrote:
| The human is using a seed, whether implicitly or
| explicitly.
|
| You can generate the same thing every time.
| 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.
| jachee wrote:
| Colored pencils don't move themselves around the paper, and
| they're not full of uncompensated training based on untold
| numbers of other artists' work. They require full agency
| and imposition of your will. That's why you get credit.
|
| A photocopier is also a tool, but you won't get credit for
| Xeroxing the Mona Lisa.
| 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.
| sejje wrote:
| I've got a better, probably incoming situation:
|
| I ask a deep-thinking LLM for a blog article, and to deliver
| that, it requests images from another LLM.
| xvokcarts wrote:
| Everybody gangsta until an object object starts falling.
| 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.
| h3half wrote:
| Why are you commenting to disagree with something the
| parent comment didn't say?
| OpenLoong wrote:
| you are right
| 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.
| protocolture wrote:
| >So just don't tell anyone you used AI?
|
| This guy literally wants his pet AI to be listed as the author.
| He then wants to sublicense the work back to himself. The AI as
| the author is the point.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >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?
|
| This is a good question. More specifically, using photoshop
| with the integrated AI features. Where is the line exactly?
| 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...
| protocolture wrote:
| So far it seems that in 99% of cases the user who generated the
| content owns it.
|
| The issue is that, for the US in particular, the bar is a bit
| higher on how much human input is required. But generally, some
| human labor needs to be mixed with the result for it to be
| yours.
|
| Every jurisdictions going to come up with a different standard,
| and then there will be an international treaty on it and then
| everyone will pipe down.
| 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.
| Suppafly 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.
|
| This, it was a poorly concocted scheme. People do stuff like
| this all the time, but even when they manage to confuse one
| branch of the government, the rest of the government isn't
| suddenly obligated to go along with it.
| creer wrote:
| I don't feel that it was a misguided attempt to "get
| copyright". Wasn't the attempt specifically to get
| copyright attributed to the AI (rather than to Thaler)? So
| it was some grand scheme about AI personhood or business
| plan about selling software that would own its output. Who
| knows. Whatever. Not relevant to copyright for AI as a
| tool.
| 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".
| bee_rider wrote:
| I don't see that option.
| __loam wrote:
| Do you think ordering your burger medium rare is also human
| authorship?
| dlivingston wrote:
| Just zooming in on txt2img, an AI generated image is:
|
| - The text prompt
|
| - The negative prompt
|
| - The model
|
| - The model seed
|
| - Any LoRAs selected
|
| What about this is copyrightable? The specific text used in the
| prompt? This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple".
|
| Maybe the summation of all of the above? But that would be akin
| to copyrighting a specific Adobe Photoshop workflow.
| Kerrick wrote:
| That sounds to me like a recipe. Recipes their interaction
| with copyright are well-established, legally speaking, in the
| United States.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Their interaction being they are in no way copyrightable
| because they are functional, not creative expressions.
| That's part of why every recipe has a dramatic story, so
| they can have a clear copyright case if copied wholesale.
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| Is that really the reason for these stories? I only know
| about them from memes, and looked it up when I first read
| about it. In my language this trend hasn't caught on yet,
| thankfully. I always chalked it up to cultural
| differences (and judged Americans a little bit for it
| tbh, since the idea of integrating a story into a recipe
| sounds rather insane).
| einr wrote:
| It is (or used to be) for SEO. Google Search loves walls
| of "relevant" text and will punish recipe sites that get
| right to the point.
| kdamica wrote:
| It's also to add vertical height so you see more ads on
| your way to the recipe.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Is that really the reason for these stories?
|
| No, it's more about ads and SEO and the fact that a lot
| of people like the touchy feely aspect of the stories and
| that causes them to engage with the site for longer,
| leaving their own comments and returning to the site and
| such.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| It's more like a set of numbers since the prompt is just an
| interface that gets tokenized.
|
| It would be like saying a DJ's equalizer settings are
| copyrightable.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| You just stated _how_ an AI generated image should be
| copyrightable. You should be able to own the copyright to all
| the configuration settings. If those settings then can be
| transformed to a 100% deterministic image (true, since you
| provide the seed) then I don 't see how this is different
| than developing a photo negative film and transferring it to
| paper.
|
| > This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple".
|
| I think this is true today. You can have copyright on this
| phrase, just consider if it were the title of a song or poem.
| seanhunter wrote:
| > I think this is true today. You can have copyright on
| this phrase, just consider if it were the title of a song
| or poem.
|
| That is not true today. You don't get a copyright on a
| phrase in particular if it was the title of a poem or song.
| For example:
|
| "There's something in the way she moves" by James Taylor[1]
|
| and "Something" by the Beatles[2] which starts with the
| same line.
|
| James has the copyright over his song called "There's
| something in the way she moves" [3] and George Harrison's
| estate has the copyright over the one he wrote with the
| same title even though he probably copied it from James
| Taylor.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/p0FJUVo-BaM?si=fGR-TOim_8FS8rkO
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/UelDrZ1aFeY?si=UG8c-cgfpgyH3I9n
|
| [3] Which was the first one fwiw. He thinks because he
| signed to "Apple Records" (the Beatles' label) they heard
| his one when he recorded it before it was released and that
| maybe gave George Harrison the idea for the line.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| I'm confused, are they both entitled to their copyright?
| (which I think should be the case)
| seanhunter wrote:
| They have copyright oveer their respective songs, not the
| phrase, so it disproves your statement that you can have
| copyright over a phase. It can be a trademark but not be
| copyrighted
| gmueckl wrote:
| The prompt is a literary work independent of the system
| processing it. If the text is sufficiently elaborate, it is
| certainly copyright able. But the resulting image is still a
| different affair.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Personally I'd like to see whether img2img works are
| copyrightable. My understanding is that copyright applies to
| the human-generated parts of an image. So e.g. In the case of a
| comic where the art is AI but the caption is human, the label
| but not the art is copyrightable.
|
| How does that apply when we transform a copyrighted image? Is
| the resulting work covered by the copyright of the original? If
| so, can I create a bad sketch drawing, transform it with
| img2img, and get the result as copyrighted? If not, is there a
| specific denoising threshold at which copyright isn't applied?
| swalsh wrote:
| Anyone who has tried prompting AI to create an image should
| know it's not "trivial". It takes skill to get a good image,
| and the prompt itself is human creativity. The idea that the
| work produced is not from a human is insane. The model is just
| a tool like a camera.
| 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.
| frankus wrote:
| Stepping back, would granting a time-limited exclusive license
| to the output of generative AI "promote the Progress of Science
| and useful Arts"?
|
| In other words is there important AI art that society would be
| missing out on because the originator deemed it not worth the
| effort without some protection against unauthorized copies
| being made?
| 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...
| protocolture wrote:
| It doesnt say that, it says that anything thats solely produced
| by simply prompting is not owned. I have seen very few works
| that want copyright and are solely prompts.
|
| From your own link:
|
| ""To be sure," the Court further explained, "the requisite
| level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will
| suffice."
|
| "The Office agrees that there is an important distinction
| between using AI as a tool to assist in the creation of works
| and using AI as a stand-in for human creativity. "
|
| "The Office concludes that, given current generally available
| technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human
| control to make users of an AI system the authors of the
| output. "
|
| Where the US ruling differs from others:
|
| "Repeatedly revising prompts does not change this analysis or
| provide a sufficient basis for claiming copyright in the
| output."
|
| Where China has had 2 cases where it supported multiple prompt
| changes + watermark
|
| Also they dont rule out a change:
|
| "There may come a time when prompts can sufficiently control
| expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human
| authorship. If further advances in technology provide users
| with increased control over those expressive elements, a
| different conclusion may be called for"
|
| ^ I would (and have) suggested that the above would likely
| cover the masking tools available in most image generators.
|
| Its certainly not a case that "AI generative outputs are not
| copyrightable".
| jarsin wrote:
| You left out the big "but". But if ai gets more optimized and
| automated our current conclusion will be more bolstered.
| protocolture wrote:
| Not really, thats covered well by:
|
| "There may come a time when prompts can sufficiently
| control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to
| reflect human authorship. If further advances in technology
| provide users with increased control over those expressive
| elements, a different conclusion may be called for"
|
| Because any "advancement" in this space is predicated on
| getting tighter control over the requested outcome.
|
| You can already script a local image generator to come up
| with random images based on text searches or LLM output.
| Thats already not copyrightable anywhere.
| jarsin wrote:
| The "but" is literally in response to what you quoted.
|
| For example if I code an entire application in c by
| myself without ai then told ai to redo the whole thing in
| rust I would retain copyright.
|
| If you just prompt the same application from scratch and
| accept by in large the outputs. No copyrighht. This is
| how the vast majority are using it to create new systems
| not using it as a tool to enhance majority human
| generated code or images or books etc.
|
| The more it creates from pure prompts the lesser chance
| you have to claim copyright.
| protocolture wrote:
| >This is how the vast majority are using it
|
| [Citation Required]
|
| Largely covered by the other quotes. I think it would be
| quite difficult to create a product worth protecting
| using "prompts alone".
|
| No debugging? No editing? Who put the graphics on it? Who
| built the database and schema?
|
| The co-author/co-editing approach is already blessed in
| the document linked earlier. Code is already subject to
| some of the best co-editing tools in the ecosystem. Even
| if someone manages to avoid co-editing tools, launch a
| product having used "prompts alone" and monetise it, how
| are you going to prove that they didn't take the co-
| editing approach to development? And how are you planning
| to challenge their claimed copyright? Why would you
| challenge their claimed copyright instead of just
| generating it yourself?
|
| I could conceive of some kind of anti copyleft
| organization that dedicates itself to challenging every
| unskilled software development firm, using the discovery
| phase to pull records of what tools were used. But who
| would fund such a witch-hunt?
|
| Or maybe every time some firm tries to assert their
| copyright, we will see lawyers hit back with "Prove you
| coded this and didnt generate it wholecloth via LLM"
| clogging up the courts for decades.
|
| >The more it creates from pure prompts the lesser chance
| you have to claim copyright.
|
| Yeah but unlike image generators and media articles its
| going to be a lot tougher to prove.
|
| NovelAI has a feature where it does text highlighting
| based on:
|
| "User wrote this" "User edited this" "Generated"
|
| It sets this on a per sentence basis.
|
| I have wondered for a long time whether this will become
| mandatory in some jurisdictions. But even then, if you
| copy the text, and paste it in a new window, bam its all
| considered user generated again.
| Kye wrote:
| It sounds like even something minimal like choosing,
| applying, and adjusting one of the nodes in something like
| ComfyUI would be sufficient.
| protocolture wrote:
| Yes. And anyone who has stepped outside of the chat
| ecosystem and used something like NovelAI or Sudowrite will
| be familiar with the co-editing approach those tools use
| which is easily accounted for with the above.
| jaco6 wrote:
| No one wants AI or AI companies to get credit for AI generated
| art. That would be like giving the camera company a share of
| movie royalties. The AI is a tool to aid in artistic output. Even
| if someone does nothing more than write the prompt and then stick
| their name at the top, they wrote the prompt, which is a creative
| act, and so under current copyright logic they deserve credit for
| profits associated with the work.
| 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?
| shagie wrote:
| (1) ask a lawyer if your tweaks were sufficiently creative to
| justify a copyright.
|
| (2) the work produced by the AI photo generator may itself be
| sufficiently derivative of other works that your work is also
| derivative and the original author may have a copyright claim
| against you since only they can authorize the distribution of
| derivative works.
|
| (3) If you use the AI photo as a reference for a painting, this
| again falls into the "it may be derivative of another work."
|
| For example, if I asked "Create a realistic black and white
| photograph of a moon rising over Half Dome in Yosemite." and it
| generated an image that was derivate of
| https://articles.anseladams.com/story-of-moon-and-half-dome/
| and then you used that image as a reference for your own, your
| image may be considered derivative of the Ansel Adams image.
|
| Just because the AI can't claim copyright on an image doesn't
| mean that the image it generated is not derivative of another
| that you would potentially be infringing on.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Can't do shit anymore
| 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.
| anikom15 wrote:
| They can certainly copyright a derivative work from AI-
| generated content.
| 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.
| kemitchell wrote:
| I encourage you to read the opinion.
|
| There was nothing to nail down here. The Copyright Office
| rejected the registration. The Review Board affirmed. The
| trial court affirmed. Three appeals court judges affirmed. No
| dissenting opinion.
| 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.
|
| If we allow these things to be copyrightable it allows what
| amounts to for-profit corporate piracy and unlicensed resale of
| all works.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _If I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from
| it._
|
| Because anyone could point point out that your jpeg contains a
| copy of the work. It's a lot harder to point out a copy of any
| work in an AI model. They're trained on so many images that you
| can't even represent one pixel worth of data per image.
| parasense wrote:
| I'm sure many of you remember the Monkey selfie from a few years
| ago... meh!
|
| I'm also sure many of you understand the farther reaching
| implications of this ruling, especially how it relates to
| software code written by AI. All that code written by AI cannot
| be licensed as anything besides public domain. Just think of all
| the code people have checked into git, that they did not write!
| Next, please consider the implications towards the open source
| community if ever there is controversy about Linux kernel code
| that was AI generated, and then suddenly cannot be covered by the
| GPL. I think the neck-beard people over at NetBSD can sometimes
| be eccentric about many things, but this topic was deserved when
| they loudly banned all AI generated code from their repos.
| protocolture wrote:
| >Stephen Thaler
|
| So this guy is arguably doing more damage than anyone to AI. The
| rulings against him are inarguable. He wants his custom AI to be
| included as an author.
|
| People take these rulings, misunderstand them and assume all AI
| tools create work that cannot be copyrighted, when plainly, every
| other AI tool lists the user as the author, and not the tool.
| TZubiri wrote:
| >>The artists argued they were entitled to copyrights for images
| they created with AI assistance -- unlike Thaler, who said that
| his "sentient" system created the image in his case
| independently.
|
| That's a factually incorrect and legally inconvenient claim.
| Turns out you can convince the court of whatever you want if that
| means you lose your case:
|
| "Yes your honour, I was both at my home and at the crime scene at
| the same time as I am omnipresent"
|
| Doesn't mean alibis are no longer valid in court
| deviantbit wrote:
| Wait until they get to code generated by AI. All of this Rust
| code that people are using and sticking in various Linux
| services. It won't be covered under the GPL. It will flat out be
| public domain.
| CMay wrote:
| Unless every aspect of AI generated art is required to be marked
| or labeled as such in some way, it will likely still gain the
| benefits of copyright assumptions in the sense that if you mix
| copyrightable and uncopyrightable material together you will
| surely deter people at least within your own country or on a
| platform that respects copyright from using it due to the
| ambiguity.
|
| Another situation is simply making "significant" manual
| copyrightable manipulations to your AI generated work to make it
| copyrighted.
|
| Outside of situations where the author doesn't really care
| whether the work is copyrighted (blog images, twitter memes), it
| may just slow down the process rather than stopping it.
|
| I'm more concerned about the ingestion side of things. I can't
| deny that the technology is awesome and generally transformative,
| but it's hard to deny that it intuitively feels wrong to just
| process all of an artist's work into a database of numbers and
| use it however you want.
|
| If artists gain widespread benefit from it too, maybe it's not as
| bad, but that doesn't help those who opt to not use it.
|
| At the same time, how does this impact those who create AI
| generated art using models created from artists who signed off on
| it? Does this mean there's no room for a business to create
| copyrightable AI generated art and thus funnel money back to the
| artists the model was populated from? Couldn't that hurt artists
| even more if the avenues of profiting from the AI shift are cut
| off, or is the main benefit of that to avoid copyright claims on
| art that turns out too similar to an existing work you didn't
| have a license for?
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Does this apply to all LLM outputs? (i.e., training a model on
| outputs from another model, a-la-DeepSeek?
| SergeAx wrote:
| This is actually great! Let's do the same with code!
| throwawaynin wrote:
| So this means the same for code??
|
| Code written by a llm is not copyrightable?
| october8140 wrote:
| This really opens the door for AI spam. If someone is making
| money selling AI spam images, you can just copy all their art and
| also post it. You don't even need to generate your own stuff.
| ciconia wrote:
| https://archive.ph/hX5Mf
| calibas wrote:
| So anything authored by an AI is effectively public domain? And
| does that go for code as well as art?
|
| I did a little reading on the subject, and it looks like these
| questions are still in the process of being answered.
| right2copy wrote:
| copyright is full of edge cases because it is not a "right" by
| any natural definition, rather it's an incoherent system of
| selective legal persecution that denies and oppresses humanity's
| natural Right to Copy, the true right that we inherit from the
| fact that we owe our very existence to genetic plagiarism
| blindriver wrote:
| Can AI patent things like drug molecules?
| mediumsmart wrote:
| If I paint the monkey taking a photo of the dude that typed the
| prompt for the scene and post that on instagram as public domain,
| can Getty Images still sue me for all of it or do they have to
| split with Adobe?
| dusted wrote:
| This is excellent news. I'm kind of surprised. I suppose it could
| also mean that anything else AI generated can't be copyrighted ?
| So corps generating code and content with AI hopefully can't
| copyright that? (of course they can, but just imagine the
| hilarity and panic that'd ensue!)
| cogman10 wrote:
| Would be pretty funny but practically I don't think it matters
| that much.
|
| Someone could steal my company's entire codebase and, outside
| potential password leaks, it'd really have little impact on our
| business. The code itself is less valuable than the coders, the
| data, and the business connections we've made.
|
| Certainly not the case for all software, but I'd wager 90% of
| the work HN does would fall into this category.
| nvesp wrote:
| Personally i feel like the prompt itself should be copyrightable
| but not the resulting image, if you want to write a book go write
| a book.
| nvesp wrote:
| Personally i feel like maybe the prompt should be copyrightable
| but not the resulting image, if you want to write a book go write
| a book.
| bluecalm wrote:
| Isn't AI just a tool here like any other? Sounds very
| inconsistent to me. It would be better to narrow copyright
| protection but grant it more liberally imo.
|
| Non tech people deciding on tech cases. In the next episode we
| will get AI paintbrush smart enough to help you but dumb enough
| the court still let's you copyright your work. Top legal minds
| deciding if it's sufficiently dumb to meet arbitrary standard
| they came up with when deciding the previous case.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Isn't AI just a tool here like any other?
|
| In this case, no, because the human involved explicit sought a
| copyright registration listing the AI as the author, and claims
| that the work was entirely the product of the AI.
|
| (In point of fact, yes, the AI is a tool used by a human, and
| to the extent the work may be copyrightable, copyright should
| have been sought listing the human author; but that's not what
| happened, and the case deals with the legality of what was
| actually sought, not what arguably should instead have been
| sought.)
|
| > Non tech people deciding on tech cases.
|
| Almost as bad as non law people commenting on law cases.
| ineedasername wrote:
| All of these cases are misrepresented in their headlines. They
| all come down to:
|
| "The non-human cannot be the copyright holder."
|
| Otherwise, if there was a human in the loop, they can be the
| copyright holder, if they want to lay claim to it.
| floor_ wrote:
| It would be fair to say this applies to ai generated code. And
| seeing how places like google claim over 40% of their code is ai
| generated it would be fair to say they don't own the code.
| swayvil wrote:
| Cause-effect was always a broken narrative. Twice-broken when you
| attach a pricetag.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Problem is that given the same prompt "cat running" there is a
| chance the exact photo could be generated again.
| leecarraher wrote:
| how much of the work can be ai generated, would a minor human
| copyrightable addition to the artwork constitute an original
| work. what would stop someone from generating art and popping a
| watermark or some imperceivable steganographic addition such that
| the ai part and human part cannot be disentangled.
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