Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by Waterluvian » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

I would like the Copyright Office to delineate just how much effort is necessary for a work to possess “the traditional elements of authorship.” I type in MIDI instructions and play back a tune, but if I type in sentences it doesn’t count?

Maybe they can measure entropy. Did you emit a sufficient amount of data to make the Music Box work, given the Copyright Office defined ratio?

For every unit of data in your song, you must have emitted no less than 1/2 of a unit, which was specifically intended to manipulate the Music Box in order to shape outputs. Any less and the creation isn’t yours.

What do you mean I can’t copyright this song? My air drumming against the cassette player introduced very significant data, which adjusted the playback. Just a very slight legato. It’s too similar? I assure you it is not. Convert the two to Universal Data Format and check the Hamming distance. Incredibly different pieces of data, believe you, me.

This is basically the origin story for how the US Copyright Office became the galaxy’s Entropy Police. “Back in 2023 someone tried to copyright a photo of an “ottercat” surfing a DeLorean on the moon and now we’re in charge of how organized is too organized.”

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

#152

Post by mikehollinger » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

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…

I noticed this as well.

The implication to generated code is pretty astounding tho.

What about all those (c) foo 2023 prologs you see all over the place? Will there be arguments that specific lines weren’t written by a human so therefore the entirety the claim isn’t valid? Or will there be refactors to push generated code out to a well known path or construct (akin to a header / implementation or some such)?

And on top of that, what if your “secret sauce” comes back to some form of generated construct (looking at you, Whoop, with your “strain” and “recovery” scores.

Further still - can a “machine-readable medium” that was written by a machine be patented?

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

#153

Post by Bjartr » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 2:59 AM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #106

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up…

> all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright

You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.

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

#154

Post by kccqzy » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:02 AM UTC

smeagull wrote: post #134

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…

Wow, someone needs to notify photographers about this immediately. No more copyright for them.

Did you read the linked article?

> In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author.”

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

#155

Post by s1mon » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:03 AM UTC

smeagull wrote: post #134

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…

Wow, someone needs to notify photographers about this immediately. No more copyright for them.

The notice explicitly covers photography.

> In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making

> unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright

> protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a

> photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead

> created by a camera.

> The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's

> Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far

> as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the

> author.”

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

#156

Post by pclmulqdq » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:05 AM UTC

theGnuMe wrote: post #145

pclmulqdq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the open question is whether software is in the realm of patents or of copyrights. It's not unreasonable to suggest the former, since software is kind of like a widget that does stuff, except virtualizing the "widget" part to run on a generic widget of sorts. Copyrights traditionally applied to works that you would consider "artistic" rather than "inventions." What you're suggesting, about a minimal work, is…

Software alone is not patentable. You get around that by patenting a system.

That is the state of the law today, where software gets copyrighted and can't be patented, but the debate about this is more about what ought to be the case.

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

#157

Post by layer8 » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:07 AM UTC

randombits0 wrote: post #85

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…

Careful! I’ve always felt that, as written, copyright should not apply to most software. Since only creative expressions may be copyrighted and functional expressions are not copyrightable, it’s very hard to match up the copyrightable portions of software with those that are not. Requiring a declaration of what parts are and are not copyrightable for software would be a major shift in policy and require major changes…

We speak of software design for a reason. Arguably, anything involving substantial design work is copyrightable. Buildings, for example, are copyrightable, even when they only exist as architectural documents or as models. Software is rather similar.

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

#158

Post by shagie » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:08 AM UTC

kube-system wrote: post #146

shagie wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get ChatGPT to output copyright material very easily. You can also copy and paste from an existing copyrighted work. In either case, it is you, the human - with agency to do so - who should be liable for the content that you publish.

That’s the concern. You can easily identify when you are copying others work when done directly. If you use a black box that sometimes gives you infringing output, how do you use it with confidence?

You can use it, just don't use it for things that you publish without doing sufficient diligence to see if that work would be infringing on something else.

I intend to make an e-ink panel that displays woodcut style images generated by stable diffusion (get a list of a 30 or so different descriptions of scenes, and have them slowly get generated over the day and display a different one each hour).

So, here's the question - are any of those woodcut images derivative of some other work? Don't know - and it likely doesn't matter as it would be something hanging on a wall in a room.

On the other hand, if I was to collect them and publish them as a book, then I, as the human who is publishing them, would need to do sufficient diligence to see if any of them are derivative works. They might be - but I am the one publishing it then - not Stable Diffusion.

Likewise, if I was creating a collection of epic rap battles between historical figures as generated by GPT... then I should search to make sure that none of the phrases that are used in there are lifted directly from some other source. Again, it is me as the human with agency that is publishing it, not GPT.

If you were to go to Fiverr and request 100 pictures of woodcuttings or people to write epic rap battles between Julius Caesar and Ghengis Khan - would it matter if it was a human lifted the text or GPT? It is still upon you, the person publishing it to do the check.

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

#159

Post by mikehollinger » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:09 AM UTC

iainctduncan wrote: post #106

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up…

The issue to me here is that code is a literary work. Literary works are copywritable. Except that AI generated works without human authorship aren’t per this.

Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one comment or another was “this will be an interesting bit of case law.”

Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish precedent for the next half-century. :-)

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

#160

Post by iudqnolq » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 3:10 AM UTC

ftxbro wrote: post #142

iudqnolq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's the part of the bottom of the totem pole that moves first because it's on the front lines.

Each of them have long, complex procedures they have to follow in many cases, and some exceptions. A court might well be able to issue a preliminary injunction faster than an agency can do notice-and-comment rulemaking.

Agencies specialize at problems that don't need a simple rule, but rather need large amounts of meticulous and tedious special cases. They've got more bandwidth, but not necessarily shorter latency.