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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
> - 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.
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.
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.
"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.
- 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
> 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.
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 Schöpfer (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 be courts in some cases.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.)
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.)
> 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.
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?)
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.
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."
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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).
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
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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?
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?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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).
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.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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!)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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".
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>>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"
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".
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?
(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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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_and_Cop...
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.)
> - 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.
This is already essentially in iOS. In Photos edit mode, there is a Clean Up tool.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected then the image would be too?
Gotta be 1,000 words.
- 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.
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.
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.
Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable work?
> 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.
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.
If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera?
(No)
"you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.
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.
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
It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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)
Then a machine took the photo and it can't be copyrighted, apparently. These rules are totally arbitrary.
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.
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.
If they did then the monkey wouldn't have been awarded copyright on that photo.
The monkey wasn't awarded copyright on that photo. Neither was the man. Monkey's can't own copyright on anything.
You're missing the point of that comment.
On a re-read yeah perhaps I did.
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.
> 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.
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.
Compiled byte code is a derivative work of the original source code. Copyright extends to derivative works.
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.
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?
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).
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.
> 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.
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 Schöpfer (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 be courts in some cases.
[0] https://sta.dnb.de/doc/RDA-E-W135
Why is the person who "took the photo" the thing that pressed the button and not the person who did 99% of the work?
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
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Copyrights are owned by businesses all the time.
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.
We pretend businesses are people all the time.
Corporations are legal persons, that's the entire point of the form.
>If you pay someone to paint a picture, who owns the copyright?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire
It can never be the AI. The AI is NOT a person. Why are we belaboring this?
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.
AI agents will exist some day, and almost certainly some will be granted personhood status.
> 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.
You don't. You don't pay an AI. You pay a company owned by humans that offer an AI service.
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.
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.
>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.
> Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc.
this is outlandish bullshit
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.
All the classic masters have workshops, where they have students or assistants that complete a rough cut of their work and they finish it.
My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce. Yet I'm the one writing the code.
Yup. Because we agreed to that up front to "transfer ownership" or some jargon. Otherwise yes it is yours.
You can't just replace monkeys with humans when the legal system doesn't treat them as the same class of organism.
What happens if you ask "the guy" to paint a picture of mickey mouse?
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...
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
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.)
In that case there's going to be a pre-existing work-for-hire agreement where the camera operator assigns copyright to the studio.
Hollywood camera operators are in a union with a contract. They are working for hire, and have no claim beyond their contract.
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
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.
> you get the copyright
Do you, in the first scenario? I'm still not sure that you would.
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.
it depends on the courts. the law is simply complex and still vague.
There was no person that took the photo with a canon digital SLR. It was a bunch of machinery and microchips and a sensor.
And yet my company owns the copyright on all of the content I produce?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43405240
> 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)
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.)
> 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.
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?)
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.
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium-12-22-14.pdf
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_disput...
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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_disput...
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.
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/Sulawesi%...
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.
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
> 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).
god bless him. he did a mitzvah to humanity ..and all our brethren monkeys.
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.
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
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.
I'd also think the creative input jumping mediums would also be a factor. Text to image is obviously a jump.
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
That was one hell of a photogenic monkey
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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?
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.
That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.
If the output always changes for the same input prompt, did you really author anything?
It wouldn’t change on the same seed, same hardware and identical settings
> if a single human creates an AI model and trains it
... on only their own artwork?
Yeah, but this is legal loophole start
how can you prove that this is my artwork not yours???
> 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.
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...
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Couldn't the same argument be made for photography? You aren't making the image, the camera is doing all the work.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
On top of that "level of effort" is obviously very subjective.
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?
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.
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.
If you buy an expensive camera with expensive lenses, you will be able to take such photos, won't you?
Ernest Hemingway: Good pictures, what camera do you use?
Irving Penn: What typewriter do you use?
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.
Only if you get into the right place at the right time and use your tools well...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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?
Companies own copyrights of works created by their employees, not works created by their works - if such works are somehow persons...
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?
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.
> ... 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/
> If "you create" it, then it is copyrightable
No. Not everything people create is copyrightable.
https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf
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.
Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise that question for over a century.
But that’s make believe. In the real world people scoff at it like the parent comment.
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...
Why would you confidently state something that is contradicted by the link you provide?
Can they still try the Corporations Are People angle?
In what way do you think corporate personhood is relevant here?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That sounds to me like a recipe. Recipes their interaction with copyright are well-established, legally speaking, in the United States.
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.
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?
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.
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"
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).
You can click on "continue without supporting us".
I don’t see that option.
Do you think ordering your burger medium rare is also human authorship?
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.
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.
It's amazing when laws make complete and consistent sense, +100 to this great answer
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...)
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.
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.
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.
I like this idea. It's like the library of babel (https://libraryofbabel.info), but for logos.
>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.
The scammers will do it anyway and simply claim the logos were all designed by humans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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?
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.
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...
Thank you. That sounds perfectly sensible.
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.
> 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.
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.
Why are you commenting to disagree with something the parent comment didn't say?
>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.
>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.
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.
there are a lot of ways to detect AI generated imagery with low false-positives (though false-negatives are a risk)
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?
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.)
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.
What if I sell you intelligent pencils that connect to your brain and guides your fingers?
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.
So.. does the conductor of an orchestra get royalty rights? He's just prompting the "actual" musicians.
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 .
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.
How is that any different than a prompt engineer other than the degree to which "...actively participates in the performance and creation"?
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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s a good test. An artist working in oils can effectively create the same image over and over. An ai kind fails there.
> 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).
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.
Yes, I agree. I don't think I am saying anything inconsistent with that.
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.
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
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?
"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?
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).
How about selection? If I select the good image from 1000 others? Curation is also a contribution to art.
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.
I would say curation and editing are much more important than creating the art itself, but that might be a very unpopular opinion.
Perhaps. The argument here is that neither was done, however.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
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.
In this particular instance, the claim was filled out that way.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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
That's a legal implication. I'm asking what is it a practical implication. Why would an AI want to copyright their work?
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.
You don't need an AI assigned copyright to do that. Companies have humans at them too.
Well you do if someone rejects a copyright claim on the grounds that the image is AI-generated, and a court backs them up.
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.
Pretty sure Adobe is doing exactly this.
> 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.
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.
Unlicensed Human Code is 100% copyrighted and closed source.
Unlicensed AI Code is 0% copyrighted and open source and can't be closed.
Not open source...... public domain. There is a big difference.
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
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.
The AI will do that - for a price.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Can AI patent things like drug molecules?
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
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
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.
They can certainly copyright a derivative work from AI-generated content.
https://archive.ph/hX5Mf
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.
There's a fair chance models of any kind are not copyrightable.
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.
Is there AI art that didn’t involve human intervention? At minimum, somebody entered a prompt,right?
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.
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.
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?
So this means the same for code??
Code written by a llm is not copyrightable?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
Interesting, what if I create my art using AI (Photoshop AI fill or ChatGPT)
Well... that's one solution the the problem.
“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.
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...
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".
It sounds like even something minimal like choosing, applying, and adjusting one of the nodes in something like ComfyUI would be sufficient.
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.
You left out the big "but". But if ai gets more optimized and automated our current conclusion will be more bolstered.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
This is actually great! Let's do the same with code!
The title seems to be editorialized? The title I see is "US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator"
Maybe it was deliberately trimmed - HN titles have a length limit.
Does this apply to all LLM outputs? (i.e., training a model on outputs from another model, a-la-DeepSeek?
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.
So OpenAI's ChatGPT output cannot be copyrighted and it's legal to distill it?
No, the court did not say that AI output cannot be copyrighted. They said that a machine cannot hold the copyright.
Just because the output of the model cannot be copyrighted doesn’t mean the model itself can’t be copyrighted.
Good. I think copyright law is in general bad. Nothing should be copyrighted.
>>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
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?
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?
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
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".
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?
(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.
Can’t do shit anymore
Awesome!!!!
I have trouble finding public domain pics & vids
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
No truer words have been said.
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).
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.
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.
It is.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/invoke-snags-first-ai-imag...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
These judges are going to be in serious trouble once AI turns against us. #AIRights
i think you'll be in great trouble by gossiping about the AI takeover /s