Authors Risk Losing Copyright If AI Content Is Not Disclosed, US Guidance Says (arstechnica.com) 100
The US Copyright Office has issued (PDF) guidance today to clarify when AI-generated material can be copyrighted. Ars Technica reports: Guidance comes after the Copyright Office decided that an author could not copyright individual AI images used to illustrate a comic book, because each image was generated by Midjourney -- not a human artist. In making its decision, the Copyright Office committed to upholding the longstanding legal definition that authors of creative works must be human to register works. Because of this, officials confirmed that AI technologies can never be considered authors. This wasn't the only case influencing new guidance, but it was the most recent. Wrestling with the comic book's complex authorship questions helped prompt the Copyright Office to launch an agency-wide initiative to continue exploring a wider range of copyright issues arising as the AI models that are used to generate text, art, audio, and video continue evolving.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the guidance is an author's "duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration." When registering works, authors must distinguish which content is human-authored and which content is AI-generated. If applicants aren't sure how to refer to the AI-generated content, the Copyright Office recommends providing a general statement that the work contains AI-generated content. That will prompt the office to follow up to help each author fill in the blanks in an application.
For artists who have pending applications or have already registered works that contain AI-generated content, the Copyright Office suggests correcting the public record by submitting a supplementary registration. Any failure to accurately reflect the role of AI in copyrighted works could result in "losing the benefits of the registration," the office warned. That could leave works vulnerable to being copied, with little or no legal recourse for copyright infringement claims. Failure to disclose AI-generated content is the only type of infringement discussed in the guidance. Critics like Alex J. Champandard, a co-founder of Creative.ai -- a group of hackers and artists interested in generative AI -- tweeted to say that current guidance puts authors in a precarious catch-22 situation. "By disclosing the AI, you're opening yourself up to infringement, but by not disclosing AI, it's safer but in violation of [the US Copyright Office]!" Champandard's tweet suggested.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the guidance is an author's "duty to disclose the inclusion of AI-generated content in a work submitted for registration." When registering works, authors must distinguish which content is human-authored and which content is AI-generated. If applicants aren't sure how to refer to the AI-generated content, the Copyright Office recommends providing a general statement that the work contains AI-generated content. That will prompt the office to follow up to help each author fill in the blanks in an application.
For artists who have pending applications or have already registered works that contain AI-generated content, the Copyright Office suggests correcting the public record by submitting a supplementary registration. Any failure to accurately reflect the role of AI in copyrighted works could result in "losing the benefits of the registration," the office warned. That could leave works vulnerable to being copied, with little or no legal recourse for copyright infringement claims. Failure to disclose AI-generated content is the only type of infringement discussed in the guidance. Critics like Alex J. Champandard, a co-founder of Creative.ai -- a group of hackers and artists interested in generative AI -- tweeted to say that current guidance puts authors in a precarious catch-22 situation. "By disclosing the AI, you're opening yourself up to infringement, but by not disclosing AI, it's safer but in violation of [the US Copyright Office]!" Champandard's tweet suggested.
Some clear standard must be created (Score:3)
This whole "you are covered, you aren't covered" bullshit has got to stop.
It makes sense that you can't copyright an image that Midjourney just shat out. But how is an image made with substantial inpainting and outpainting (perhaps in SD) different from an image made with Photoshop and a bunch of content-aware fill? Answer, it is not, but somehow you can copyright the Photoshopped image?
Re:Some clear standard must be created (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more complicated than that.
The USPTO ruling is basically that raw AI art generations can't be copyrighted on their own, even if the prompt (let alone the whole workflow that led up to them, which for your average advanced AUTOMATIC1111 user can be quite complex!) is itself copyrightable, because the user doesn't control the exact layout of the image, and that can be very different from one seed to the next. Which to me seems absurd, akin to saying that if a programmer codes a program that contains enough creative work to be copyrightable, the code is copyrightable, but the compiled program isn't, because the user had no control over how the compiler designed and laid out the machine code, which can be very different from one compiler to the next, or one system to the next.
BUT, that said:
They DID explicitly declare that not only can postprocessing steps be creative elements that render a final work copyrightable, but also the selection process applied to generate images can be. This falls under the "compilation" part of US copyright law, wherein a person can create a copyrighted work by the creative effort involved in selecting and/or arranging non-copyrighted works (or even works copyrighted by others, so long as they have permission or fall under fair use). Given that virtually nobody just does "one generation and they're done", even the laziest of users, this is a large window open for copyright protection - and the USPTO even explicitly spells out how to file this sort of claim.
Furthermore, the USPTO's understanding seems to be pretty limited to only the most basic tools (their limited knowledge being a fact that they openly admit to, and state that they'll issue further guidance in the future as their understanding evolves)... basically, a Midjourney-like interface with a text prompt, and a couple sliders or whatnot. But the grounds that they laid out for why photographs should have copyright but not AI generations - the control of the layout - suggests that new tools like ControlNet should, under the USPTO guidance, be copyrightable, since ControlNet gives the user immense control over the precise layout of the final image.
So overall, while this ruling leaves a lot to be desired, it also leaves a lot open.
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(And honestly, even the "photographers control the layout" thing seems weak to me. Ansel Adams didn't get to choose where each tree went, where the clouds were positioned on a given day, etc etc. He only got to choose when to stop walking and set up his camera. In this regard, even with the most basic of AI art tools, AI art generators have a lot more control over their scenes than many if not most photographers)
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He only got to choose when to stop walking and set up his camera.
Find another way of telling us that your knowledge of photography in general and the methods and techniques used by Ansel Adams in particular, are superficial at best.
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His point still stands, though.
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My photography class used the Ansel Adams guide to photography, but I still agree with the point being made. With photography you're working with what's in the world. With diffusion models you're working with what's in the model. In both cases there's things you control, and things you don't. Both offer you dramatically less control than paint and canvas, even given all the stuff you can affect while shooting or printing a photograph. Yet the meanest, least skilled photograph with the least manipulation inv
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If you want to talk about camera settings and configurations, boy, let me show you what the interface to AUTOMATIC1111 looks like with all the extensions, scripts, and models...
Re: Some clear standard must be created (Score:2)
The important thing is that you've found a way to be a dick on the Internet.
Re: Some clear standard must be created (Score:2)
Well, thanks for stepping up to stand beside me, anyway.
Copyrighting the sources, not the binary (Score:2)
Which to me seems absurd, akin to saying that if a programmer codes a program that contains enough creative work to be copyrightable, the code is copyrightable, but the compiled program isn't, because the user had no control over how the compiler designed and laid out the machine code, which can be very different from one compiler to the next, or one system to the next.
You do realize that for quite some extent of time, at the dawn of computer age, that's literary how software copyright used to work?
That's the reason why early software was published as source code, as part of a book (think Lions' Unix book).
Copyright on the binary images arrived later on (Apple vs Franklin lawsuit [wikipedia.org]) as the popular microcomputer finally offered widespread semi-standardised platforms where the same binary image could be copied.
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AI in a nutshell:
"How lazy can I be and still get paid?!"
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Except for fair-use exemptions, which are actually pretty broad (but only testable in a court of law).
I'm not sure what this has to do with the GP's post, however, which was about the USPTO declaring raw outputs of AI art tools to be un-copyrightable, aka public domain, with copyright only applying to creative activity in selection and postprocessing.
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Uh, yeah, it literally does mean you can use copyrighted works, not be liable for damages, and gain copyright on your new work, for any of several different reasons. That's what fair use is - the right to use copyrighted works in various manners that are either deemed to the public benefit or in a parodic or transformative manner, with no permission and no recompense to the copyright holder, and said transformations ABSOLUTELY can be copyrighted. Do you think there's no copyright on Weird Al albums, for exa
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Do you think there's no copyright on Weird Al albums, for example, or that he has to sign over all the profits from them, or get permission from the bands he's riffing on?
I agree with what you said, but it's worth noting that Weird Al does get permission before he does parodies. I'm not sure which the first track he got permission for was, though — clearly he didn't ask about his first couple of tracks (My Bologna, and Another One Rides the Bus.) Also, some countries don't have fair use.
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The point is, taking an un-copyrightable image & tweaking it, doesn't make it copyrightable.
Yes it makes it copyright able.
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AFAIK, if you Photoshop a copyright image, the copyright doesn't automatically transfer to you. It still belongs to the original copyright holder & you need their permission to publish it.
"Photoshop" is a software package to create and edit images. It is a noun.
Using it as a verb is common to do but in no way a proper usage of the name, and in cases like this (as you demonstrated) can only cause confusion.
"if you Photoshop a copyright image, the copyright doesn't automatically transfer to you."
If I open Photoshop to a new blank window and create a new image, that image is under MY copyright.
There is no transfer, it didn't even exist before I made it. The original copyright holder is me.
Usi
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And yet, you are the only person in the world who has an objection to the wording here.
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It [the copyright of the ORIGINAL IMAGE] still belongs to the original copyright holder & you need their permission to publish it.
The new image is copyrighted by you: which still opens the question if - in general: YES - you need their permission to publish your work
Copyright is a kind of stupid word - especially if you compare it to moral rights in other countries.
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They are specifically looking at "human" created content vs. AI created content.
The unanswered question is how much AI involvement turns it from a human work to an AI work.
Human created content is eligible for copyright to protect the human artist. At this point we don't need to protect AI generated content, at least not until the AI becomes self aware.
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You're covered in the work as a whole. However the individual portions may not be. If you have a book with a large collection of images of public domain paintings, the work itself can be copyrighted but each individual image itself is not copyrighted unless substantive changes have been made to them. AI is similar, no reason to treat it as a special case.
I don't think the title is accurate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't think the title is accurate (Score:5, Informative)
If you say that you have a copyright, but you can't actually enforce that copyright against anyone, do you actually have what most people would consider to be a copyright? Or do you have a metaphorical sticker that tells people "to your own conscience be true"?
Registration with the copyright office is necessary to have an enforceable copyright. [wiley.law] If you're happy with voluntary compliance, then indeed, skip it.
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The link is either wrong or tries to nitpick in "enforcable".
If I have the copyright, I have the copyright. No need to damn register it.
Might it be more easy to enforce if it is registered: no damn idea. Fact is: it is enforceable in either case.
That law firm, you linked, most likely only wants to cash in fees in "helping you" registering a copyright.
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The link is not wrong. You are wrong. Stay in your lane.
The Supreme Court of the United States [supremecourt.gov] says so, the American Bar Association [americanbar.org] says so, multiple large law firms [mintz.com] say so, and I, as an attorney at one of them, say so.
Wrong.
If by "more easy" you mean being able
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If I have the copyright, I have the copyright. No need to damn register it.
Wrong.
Not wrong. Perhaps you should read the first paragraphs of copyright law?
Posting links you obviously did not comprehend: don't give you a case :P
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Dude, just take the loss. You have the actual case and three different reportings of it in front of you.
And what, pray tell, are "the first paragraphs of copyright law?" If you're referring to 17 USC 102(a), then again, as already identified in my original post, that makes for a nice metaphorical sticker, but you can't do anything with it. You have to register it before anyone else has to care.
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The link is either wrong or tries to nitpick in "enforcable".
If I have the copyright, I have the copyright. No need to damn register it.
Might it be more easy to enforce if it is registered: no damn idea. Fact is: it is enforceable in either case.
Copyright is automatic, as soon as you fix an original creative work in a tangible medium, but registration is required as a prerequisite to suit. In other words, you can't enforce your copyright until you register it. You don't need to register it immediately (though you lose rights to statutory damages and attorneys' fees if you don't), but you need to register it at some point prior to filing suit for infringement.
See 17 USC 411(a) [cornell.edu]: "Except for an action brought for a violation of the rights of the auth
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Registration with the copyright office is necessary to have an enforceable copyright.
No, registration is necessary to be able to sue for copytight enfringment. But registration applies retroactively, so if you want to sue someone for copying your unregistered work, you just have to register it (which can take up to a year), and then sue. From the article you linked:
Although today’s ruling establishes that an infringement suit must await the Copyright Office’s registration of the copyright, it also makes clear that once the copyright has been registered, a copyright owner can recover for infringement that occurred both before and after registration.
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Small problem with that: if you do it that way, you can't seek statutory damages, and you can't seek an award of attorneys' fees and costs [cornell.edu], you can only seek "the copyright owner's actual damages and any additional profits of the infringer."
Your claim is no longer economically viable. So again, you really don't have an enforceab
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No, registration is necessary to be able to sue for copytight enfringment. But registration applies retroactively, so if you want to sue someone for copying your unregistered work, you just have to register it (which can take up to a year), and then sue.
Though you are, of course, correct, the important part for this article is that you still need to get that registration, and the copyright office will not register works naming an AI as an artist or author.
Can copyright finally collapse, please? (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright should have died with the emergence of infinite reproducibility.
Lawyers made sure it didn't. It came down to a battle between privacy and IP rights.. IP rights won.
We've had the "who owns an ape's selfie" discussion, now we have the "who owns AI generated art" discussion.
I have no doubt the big money lawyers will win this one too, but it's less clear who they will support, the owners of the AI, the operators who prompt it to create specific works, or some other party.
The direction is clear, however: authorship is becoming less significant. It is being kept alive artificially by lawyers for commercial interests far beyond the original idea in the age of print & typewriters.
Maybe soon an AI lawyer will be able to challenge the pricey human ones and the bits will finally be free?
Re:Can copyright finally collapse, please? (Score:5, Insightful)
But yes, a machine (or the corporation that owns it) that stamps out variations & combinations of already existing works, styles, genres, topics, themes, etc., that should never be allowed to hold copyright.
Of course, readily available copyright-free resources allows a lot of creative artists to do stuff they wouldn't be able to do legally otherwise for fear of being hunted down & sued to death by copyright trolls. All they have to do is identify the parts of works that are AI generated & the parts that are their own work. It's also more honest about what the artist has actually contributed to the works & can claim credit for.
On another note, this is great news for open educational resources (OER). If AI generated content can't be copyright, then that frees up creators to produce OER so much more quickly & cheaply than before. This could be the thing that launches OER as a full-on challenge to the hyper-exploitative commercial education publishing corps, rather than the preserve of a few leading universities & NGOs that are currently making slow progress.
Re:Can copyright finally collapse, please? (Score:5, Interesting)
Prompt: Write a scientific explanation of why the sun appears to rise and set every day.
ChatGPT: The apparent rising and setting of the Sun is caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis. As the Earth rotates, different parts of its surface are alternately exposed to the Sun's rays, creating the illusion that the Sun is moving across the sky. Specifically, the Earth rotates from west to east, and the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. This is because, as the Earth rotates, the part of the surface facing the Sun experiences daylight, while the part facing away from the Sun experiences night.
Additionally, the Earth's axis is tilted with respect to its orbit around the Sun, which causes the Sun's position in the sky to vary throughout the year. This is responsible for the changing length of daylight hours during different times of the year, such as longer days during the summer and shorter days during the winter.
It's important to note that the Sun itself is not actually moving across the sky; rather, it is the rotation of the Earth that creates this appearance. The Sun remains in a fixed position relative to the Earth, as it is approximately 93 million miles away from our planet.
Prompt: Write five multiple choice questions about the above explanation.
ChatGPT: What causes the apparent rising and setting of the Sun?
A) {False} The movement of the Sun around the Earth
B) {True} The rotation of the Earth on its axis
C) {False} The gravitational pull of the Moon
D) {False} The rotation of the Sun on its axis
Answer: B
In what direction does the Earth rotate?
A) {False} North to south
B) {False} East to west
C) {True} West to east
D) {False} South to north
Answer: C
Why does the length of daylight hours change throughout the year?
A) {False} The Sun moves closer and farther away from the Earth
B) {False} The Earth moves closer and farther away from the Sun
C) {False} The rotation of the Earth slows down and speeds up
D) {True} The tilt of the Earth's axis causes the Sun's position in the sky to vary
Answer: D
Does the Sun actually move across the sky?
A) {True} No
B) {False} Yes
C) {False} Only during certain times of the year
D) {False} It depends on the observer's location
Answer: A
How far away is the Sun from the Earth?
A) {False} 1 million miles
B) {False} 10 million miles
C) {True} 93 million miles
D) {False} 1 billion miles
Answer: C
Prompt: Summarise the explanation in point form.
The apparent rising and setting of the Sun is caused by the rotation of the Earth on its axis
As the Earth rotates, different parts of its surface are alternately exposed to the Sun's rays
This creates the illusion that the Sun is moving across the sky
The Earth rotates from west to east, so the Sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west
The Earth's axis is tilted with respect to its orbit around the Sun, causing the Sun's position in the sky to vary throughout the year
The changing position of the Sun is responsible for the changing length of daylight hours during different times of the year
The Sun remains in a fixed position relative to the Earth, as it is approximately 93 million miles away from our planet
You can, of course, also generate illustrations & other media to support/scaffold pupil's learning/understanding. It all takes a few minutes instead of hours. When it's published in an OER repository others can see, use, & contribute to & improve it, just like free and open source software projects; everyone benefits (except exploitative commercial publishers).
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Prompt: Write a scientific explanation of why the sun appears to rise and set every day. Have it be long, detailed, in-depth, and entirely wrong.
Answer: The apparent rising and setting of the sun each day is a fascinating phenomenon that has been observed by humans since the beginning of time. While there are many scientific explanations for this phenomenon, the most accepted one is that the sun appears to move across the sky due to the rotation of the Earth on its axis. However, recent studies have reveale
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Yeah, but that is so obviously wrong: it is the roosters!
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We still need copyright so that original works by artists can still provide an income, i.e. so that we have skilled, talented, professional artists producing original, creative, innovative, sometimes revolutionary works.
This is fine but it ultimately means copyright is a mechanism that subsidizes art by creating artificial scarcity.
I agree that art is good for society and deserves to be subsidized, but I don't think the current copyright mechanism is the only possible way to do so.
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ultimately means copyright is a mechanism that subsidizes art by creating artificial scarcity.
"Ultimately" it means that? It is the entire purpose of copyright.
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There were artists before there was copyright. How did that work?
Before copyright there was patronage (where someone with money who liked what you did paid you to do it) and commissions (where someone hired you to create work).
Today, those ideas both still also exist. We also have things like go-fund-me, patreon, indiegogo, onlyfans, etc etc. For performance art, you can still charge for the performances.
I'm not saying copyright should necessarily go away completely, but I'm not convinced we need it as much
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Patronage was for the elite & the tastes & whims of essentially feudal rulers. If you want to go back to that
Go back to that? Who do you think is paying enough for paintings today to any artist making a living as a painter?
And the music industry... or movies, that's pretty much a whose-who of rich people deciding who gets the money and who doesn't.
And how much content on go-fund-me, patreon, indiegogo, onlyfans, etc., etc., is public domain?
That's entirely beside the point. It's a model that pays artists to create and release new things. Whether or not those things are protected by copyright after the fact really doesn't change the model.
I backed a kickstarter project to make a game, for example, because i
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Patronage was for the elite & the tastes & whims of essentially feudal rulers.
That's because back then the elite had exclusive ability to afford such patronage. Nowadays normal people have much more expendable income, not to mention the prominence of crowdsourcing or similar.
And how much content on go-fund-me, patreon, indiegogo, onlyfans, etc., etc., is public domain?
Obviously none unless the author for some reason decided to forfeit the copyright and put the work in the public domain.
There is not a good reason for an author to do so though, as a similar result can be achieved by using a permissive license.
Copyright in the US elapses 70 years after the author died, so those w
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not to mention the prominence of crowdsourcing or similar.
I meant crowdfunding of course...
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Before copyright there was patronage (where someone with money who liked what you did paid you to do it) and commissions (where someone hired you to create work)
Yes and during that time you either where rich like Michel Angelo or Leornado Da Vinci, and belonged to the most likely smallest elitist circle on the planet: or a starving beggar. Hint: the number of artists was way smaller than the amount of people able to pay/patronage one.
For performance art, you can still charge for the performances.
Sure. Did
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Yes and during that time you either where rich like Michel Angelo or Leornado Da Vinci, and belonged to the most likely smallest elitist circle on the planet: or a starving beggar. Hint: the number of artists was way smaller than the amount of people able to pay/patronage one.
And the same is still true to today for painters, sculptors, poets, and the like. What has really changed? Most of them have 'day job' because 'artist' doesn't pay the bills.
Supposed you want to earn $100k in a country like the USA.
Most musicians don't make anywhere near that; most americans don't make anywhere near that. The whole scenario is unicorn farts. You don't need to convince me that its not realistic making $100k/year as a musician on ticket sales -- I know this. You might as well explain why it's hard to make a living playing pro basketball.
That's besid
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It creates artificial scarcity by, in the words of the Constitution, giving 'exclusive rights' to the author. Since the author has exclusive rights, he can make access to his work as scarce as he wants.
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How does copyright create artificial scarcity? AFAIK, there's no limit to the number of people &/or copies of a work that can be licensed.
My understanding of the term artificial scarcity [wikipedia.org] is as explained in the article:
Artificial scarcity is scarcity of items despite the technology for production or the sufficient capacity for sharing.
As the article further explains, "intellectual property" in general is a prime example of a construct which creates artificial scarcity:
Even though ideas as illustrated above can be shared with less constraints than physical goods, they are often treated as unique, scarce, inventions or creative works, and thus allotted protection as intellectual properties in order to allow the original authors to potentially profit from their own work
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Then either your understanding of "artificial scarcity" is wrong or your link.
There is nothing artificial scarce in a Netflix video that is under copyright.
Except: it might not be watchable in the country you are residing atm, that is basically the only drawback of current copyright.
There is no damn restriction in accessing anything you consider scarce: it is just there. You only can not monetize on it. That is all, and utterly fair!
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"Ultimately" it means that? It is the entire purpose of copyright.
My post was in the context of the statement:
We still need copyright so that original works by artists can still provide an income
So yes, in that context, copyright has IMHO no other purpose.
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Or to just...produce.
There are many copyrighted things that would probably not have been written without copyright. Things like Linux, or maybe VLC, or some of the thousands or millions of other open-source programs out there that we use everyday for everything.
"Copyleft" doesn't exist witho
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Then why is MIT license a thing?
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Without copyright their is no need for the GPL.
Without copyright anyone can take the code from Windows and include it in Linux.
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Insightful stuff buried deep, but I was looking for the obligatory "Funny" about blaming the typewriter for becoming too smart... (The tools and the technologies remain morally neutral, but when it comes to the PROFIT, we need to get the politics out of money [sic]. One of my meme-worms of the week?)
Re:Can copyright finally collapse, please? (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright was invented because of near-infinite reproducibility. When the printing press became mainstream, this utter freedom of printing what ever you liked had to be stopped. So you could say that, to the copyright enthusiasts, infinite reproducibility is the reason to enlarge its term towards infinity.
Personally, I think the printing press was involved in overturning a medieval communal society into an every-man-for himself society. And that, in this process, the resistance to the corruption within the Catholic church was a key component.
There was earlier resistance to that corruption, but Luther was the first who actually printed pamphlets and therefore could not be stopped. From there, lots of people still believed but not in the church leaders, which led to interest in the creation and therefore science. The whole notion of individual freedom and expression started with the freedom to read the bible, pamphlets, etc. Off course, the printing press had enabled printing text in the local language instead of only Latin, which enabled the common man to more easily learn to read.
And then America was discovered, and the possibilities were endless. I think the combination of all this has ended the Middle Ages and eventually led to the industrial revolution.
So spread words are dangerous and alas it is natural that some people want to control them.
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There is an interesting history science video about how the collapse of the roman empire lead to the dark ages, aka illiteracy etc. for centuries in Europe.
It boils down to the simple fact that most biggest export good from Egypt was Papyrus, and the papyrus paper made from it. Basically every street corner of a bigger roman town had a library. Books as in novels, but also science flourished all over Europe, even up into the northern edges of un-occupied German and Skandinavia.
However with the collapse of t
Re:Can copyright finally collapse, please? (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes ZERO sense. The purpose of copyright is to encourage new works to be created, by giving control of the work to the author (so he can sell it). If we didn't have 'infinite reproducibiiity' (ie every copy had to be hand made by the author) THEN there would be no need for copyright. "Infinite reproducibility" is the entire REASON for copyright.
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Copyright should have died with the emergence of infinite reproducibility.
Nonsense like this is only said by people who never did achieve/produce anything in their life that is worth a copyright. And have no clue about the topic anyway.
The cheaper reproduction of a work is: the more highly valuable a copyright is.
When Albrecht Duerrer went to the pope and the Emperor for his wood cutting and copper plate cutting prints: the copy right infringers had a stupid high amount of work to do to actually make copies
All credit to humans (Score:2)
The person who caused the AI to create should get the credit and be able to copyright the result. This makes for simple law. Any alternative is messy and leads to the farce of this story.
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Re: All credit to humans (Score:2)
Maybe, just as compression indicates information density, the measure of creativity might be how readily an AI can create a work in the same vein.
Re: All credit to humans (Score:2)
>The person who caused the AI to create should get the credit and be able to copyright the result. This makes for simple law. Any alternative is messy and leads to the farce of this story.
This would enable a land grab of copyright. An AI can churn out writing, the owner then searching later works that could violate the copyrighted works their AI churned out.
Realistically? (Score:2)
Is this going to have a significant effect? The copyright troll who tried this would have to take it to court to get a significant settlement. Publishers have legal departments. Running all proposed publications through a plagiarism checker - like we do with essays submitted for university course work - would show up any significant matches. I think your concern is soluble.
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>Is this going to have a significant effect? The copyright troll who tried this would have to take it to court to get a significant settlement. Publishers have legal departments. Running all proposed publications through a plagiarism checker - like we do with essays submitted for university course work - would show up any significant matches. I think your concern is soluble.
Yes, likely very serious effects. Patent trolls are already a thing, despite companies having legal departments. They only need a re
Hmmm... maybe (Score:2)
I've a nasty suspicion you may be right. Thank you for making me think harder about this topic. Thoroughly depressing!
Re: Hmmm... maybe (Score:2)
I hope not. Thanks for the discussion!
Art Tools (Score:1)
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The USPTO's argument is that you decided the layout / overall vision, while AI art tools decide the layout.
Except that's bunk, for a wide variety of reasons.
1) Let's stick with your very statue sculpting example. To quote a famous (possibly apocryphal) quote from Michelangelo, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it." Artists generally start out with a rough idea of what they want, then adapt it based on how things look as it develops. Sculpture being
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Right? So many of the comments are clearly by people who have little to no background in the arts.
And what about programming? Someone already made the case about a compiler producing an separate output based on user instructions (the written code). However, they're already using various levels of AI in development environments (Ex. Visual Studio IntelliCode : https://visualstudio.microsoft... [microsoft.com] "IntelliCode brings AI assistance directly into your personal development flow".
Does this ruling mean that mean anyt
Copyright (Score:3)
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Copyright exists to protect a creator's right to make money from their work. Without it authors and artists could not make a living from their work.
Copyright was created to A) encourage artists to create, so B) society as a whole benefits from those works existing.
The original focus was entirely on "B"
Before copyright artists already made money, although not in the same ways as today. This is where the term "patronage" comes in. Art was a work-for-hire, with no protections at all.
Copyright was created so having a single patron was no longer the only option.
It provided for multiple patrons and protections for the artist so that choice could be made *a
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While I agree with most of what you stated, I take issue with "Software creating a work at the direction of the human artist however Should grant the artist protection.".
If the "artist" is not really putting in any work/effort, what are we protecting? Or if we value that, then maybe AI generated works, whole or in part, receive very limited copyright protection; say, maybe 10 years. The idea that artists had patrons or we should protect artists comes about from the fact that they had a valued skill set tha
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I think your missing the point. When the tool you didn't create allows you to automate non-trivial amounts of ideas into existence in seconds at no real expense, you don't deserve copy protection.
e.g. Make me 1,000 unique and distinguishable panoramic vistas of pandas on Mars.
I'm not saying it's not art or that it has no value, but it certainly should not be protected.
Now, if some one is really using them as tools as part of a process that really required them to put some effort into it, like using Photosh
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People that "spouts orders" don't have legal protection to prevent others from trying to issuing those same orders. Why would protecting that have value? Maybe you should try a car analogy.
Re: Copyright (Score:1)
Itâ(TM)s probably saner for society to draw the line here (for now at least). The last thing Iâ(TM)d want to see is a case where two generative AI art pieces that look nigh identical to one another are trying to claim plagiarism against one another.
Since the only technique involved would be prompts, itâ(TM)d likely end with someone getting the right to copyright individual words, tags, and even phrases. Not exactly a great legal precedent to set for the visual arts.
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The idea that artists had patrons or we should protect artists comes about from the fact that they had a valued skill set that was uncommon among society at large.
That is not really true.
The most majourity who had thees skill sets simply could not express them or show them, because they were not much more than salves: peons on a farm
Then there's the question of derivative works. If an AI generates very similar work for input from separate artists, who can claim their work is being "copied" when they each us
Can we expand this to AutoTune music? (Score:1)
What about CGI animation (Score:2)
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That's not "AI", that's just an algorithm applied to the data.
Hell, "AI" isn't AI either, but the blurry bit in the middle is some people trying to claim that because the computer "did it on its own" (with our rules, universe, restrictions, training, guidance, selection and purpose being given to it) that it's somehow a "creator" rather than just a tool.
It wouldn't affect things like autotune and interpolation, so long as you're not claiming that the computer in question "owns" that data because it "created
Github Copilot (Score:2)
AI piracy coming up (Score:2)
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That's not how copyright works.
What does AI include? (Score:2)
What does AI-generated content include? Anything and everything machine generated? How about spelling and grammar checkers that automatically change/correct content? What if PowerPoint's suggested style changes for imported pictures is used? What about photos that have been altered by filters or other algorithms? What if the word processor autogenerates the table of contents, page numbers, and headers and footers? Is it different if the tool suggests changes that must be manually accepted? What if th
Re: What does AI include? (Score:2)
PowerPoint presentations and other works created by Bings new assistant are now no longer copyrightable.
That's going to be interesting ðY
Derivative Works? (Score:2)
Fixed that... (Score:2)
Correction: by disclosing the AI you're opening yourself up to copying of the uncopyrightable pieces of your work, but by not disclosing the AI you're opening yourself up to having your entire work declared unprotected. Champandard tries to maintain the position that a human holds copyright on work created by the AI, but the Cop
AI works get Copyleft licenses (Score:1)
Given that AI generated content is based on the collective contributions of humanity, at worst it should fall into the Public Domain. AI generated content in my opinion lacks value until a human has evaluated it to determine if it is useful as otherwise it essentially is worthless.
I would propose at best significant transformation be granted some very limited protection for a specific expression under some sort of Copyleft type license (Creative Common, etc).
This certainly is the beginning of the end of Co
Perhaps copyright should be a percentage of own... (Score:2)
Perhaps copyright should be a percentage of ownership. You own the copyright on the original work that you put in.
The problem is, "How do you figure what the appropriate percentage is?". If there are 8 images, and you select one for inclusion, then that's 3 bits of information. If you create a novel spelling of a word, that's some information. (How much? Does it depend on how far you diverged from the dictionary?) If you selected 1 out of 8 images, the 7 discarded images aren't present, so how do you
Copyright Law Might Not Be Able To Adapt (Score:2)
Why worry about copyright when there'll be a quasi
So nothing is copyrightable... (Score:2)