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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

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Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#71

Post by sacnoradhq »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #5
rvz wrote: post #2

The human authorship requirement still stands: > If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. [0] Even with that, applicants now must disclose the inclusion of AI generated content and highlight which parts are human authored vs AI generated: > Consistent with the Office's policies described above, applicants have a dut…

If an author chooses not to credit an AI, how are they going to know? It's already not completely obvious with the current state of the art in at least some domains. What happens when the tech moves from "Not completely obvious" to "Impossible to tell?"

It's stupid to create a rule that's both unenforceable and limits protecting unique creations generated by AI but initiated by humans. Results are all that matter, not process.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#72

Post by mlindner »

brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

Sounds like the prompt itself is quite copyrightable, the same as any code is copyrightable.

Indeed in the contents is this:

> While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#74

Post by bawolff »

brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

In usa (but not uk), effort isn't relevent, just how "creative" the work is.

For example, digitizing famous paintings is labour intensive but not considered copyrihtable.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#75

Post by mlindner »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #66
brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

You might be able to copy-write the method by which you generated something, but not the thing generated itself. Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8 hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out…

Nitpick: Everyone does this, but it's "copyright" as in "the right to copy", rather than "copywrite"/"copy-write".

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#76

Post by bawolff »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #66
brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

You might be able to copy-write the method by which you generated something, but not the thing generated itself. Although even the former act might be too far, it's like saying that you fooled around with the parameters on a computer for 8 hours before it started working, and now you want to copy-write the operation of the computer: the computer is doing what it was intended to do, you just needed time to figure out…

You cannot copyright the method of doing anything.

You might be able to patent it, but that is a different thing.

Copyright applies to the end result. Patents apply to methods and mechanisms.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#77

Post by iudqnolq »

famouswaffles wrote: post #46
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

Don't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts can be overruled by congress. 100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.

It's more complex than a straightforward totem pole. (For example, you could look into Chevron deference)

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#78

Post by layer8 »

LegionMammal978 wrote: post #54

One part I found particularly interesting about this is footnote 27: > While some prompts may be sufficiently creative to be protected by copyright, that does not mean that material generated from a copyrightable prompt is itself copyrightable. I wonder if this is meant to imply that no possible prompt can produce copyrightable output. What if the prompt already contains expressive elements that the model faithfully…

There will be a case-by-case weighing of which artistic aspects were contributed by the human and which by the AI. What they are indeed saying here is that a prompt being copyrightable does not by itself imply that the generated output is copyrightable. I believe this also means that if someone takes your copyrighted prompt and uses it to produce some output, then that output doesn’t a priori infringe on your copyright.

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#79

Post by weavejester »

kube-system wrote: post #8

This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter. But it doesn’t answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI model outputs something very close to a training input, does the result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?

> This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter.

Is that sarcasm?

Re: Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

#80

Post by throwawaylinux »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #20
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.

I disagree, because instructing the device the circumstances to capture the image, whether it's a timer or motion or some other detector or your direct button press, that is not the only element of photography. They're saying the only creative elements of the work were done by machine.

If you asked me to write a poem about copyright law in the style of Shakespeare, is that something you can copyright, or a work derived from something you can copyright? I don't think so.

It's not that producing a prompt for a writer might not be a somewhat creative act itself, but that's not really recognized by copyright law. Ideas aren't copyright, works are. Colloquially people might agree that a work could be significantly derived from an idea, but I don't think that's how copyright law itself works.

Linux was written from scratch, copying no code from Unix and therefore is not a derived work or infringing on Unix copyright. Unquestionably it faithfully copied many ideas verbatim from Unix, the invention or development or discovery of those ideas were probably the most substantial creative contributions that Ritchie and Thompson had, and the code itself relatively mundane (though expertly written) by comparison. Those ideas/inventions are not classed as copyright works though.

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