161–170 of 415 posts
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,…
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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.
> 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.
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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…
Not advocating copyrightable software, but it seems clear to me that if databases are copyrightable because they represent curation, then software must be too. Any line of code, probably not. But a program as a whole, sure. Otherwise I think you blow up music copyrights too, since a single note isn’t copyrightable and a song is just a bunch of individual notes. At some point, choosing, ordering, and organizing a coll…
Circling back around to creative works, the process of making art is also one of curation, as had been amply demonstrated over 100 years ago by the Readymades of Marcel Duchamp.[1]
The curation involved in prompt selection and selection of which AI-generated works/images to use should therefore be just as copyrightable as databases, if all that copyright demands is curation.
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp
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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.
Also look at all the post processing and AI that goes into smartphone cameras right now. The human element doesn't even choose which photo this is done algorithmically and the photo is stitched together in lots of different ways. The human just prompted: 'Now!'
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Recipes are usually not copyrightable as they are just a list of ingredients and instructions with no room for expression. I wonder if the same argument could be applied to prompts.
They state this in the document as well: > 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. It sounds like it would depend on the complexity of your prompt.
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There is so many places to inject creativity into the process. Before the capture you have: Chosing the location, posing the camera, adjusting objects in the background, setting up bate to attract wildlife, choosing optimal camera settings. Even selecting a camera could be considered a creative input. After the capture, the artist can choose which of the thousands of captures best fits their vision, crop it and apply…
You can do most of that with prompting and tools like control net in stable diffusion as well. And then take it into photoshop and do changes, feed it back into img2img and inpaint until your hearts content. One can spend multitudes more time than it too to tap the shutter button on an iPhone. In Midjourney of course, you have far less control.
The copyright office clearly has not the slightest clue about what they're talking about when they claim that the AI is the sole creator here. AI generated content has always been a collaboration with humans, and there's always human creativity involved.
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"at maximum, the spectre of AI contribution might virally taint the entire film" - which would also mean that anyone who used GitHub Copilot would not be able to copyright their software code.
I hadn't thought of that -- but yes, it very well might be the case. Let's say there's a 50% (extremely generous!) limit on AI contribution. An efficient company will operate close to that line, say, targeting a 49% AI contrib. (Remember how inexpensive AI contribution is in comparsion to human contribution. Market pressure will push people towards tenths of percentage points.) That means that Joey, your new intern,…
In many ways software projects for years now have this issue.
A decade ago when ruby on rails scaffolded out a project - is the result copyrightable according to the new guidance?
Separating out copyrighting software design at a comment level from software implementation is going to be the direction this all goes as the tools rapidly get significantly better.
Which is also going to be great, as imagine how a codebase designed this way might be able to be switched to a new language or switch out the 3rd party API being used or database being run on.
People are worried about protecting their busy work rather than evolving with the technology to establish their value above and beyond the busywork parts.
My value in software engineering isn't in typing up the loop, and less even in knowing that I'll need one. It's in knowing how to manage complexity across a broader cross integration of concerns. The way I'm doing that will change as technology advances, but it will still be some time before that part is automated too.
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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 Constituti…
"representatives of original intellectual conceptions"?
Wouldn't that only to apply to photos made with some preconceived idea of what you wanted the photo to look like?
What about spontaneous, "point and shoot" photos? What about a photo that I take with my eyes closed, without intent? And how original is your typical family snapshot or wedding photo? They're about as generic and unoriginal as you can get, yet there's no doubt they're copyrightable.