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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

#201

Post by iainctduncan »

Bjartr wrote: post #153
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.

I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world of music publishing....

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

#202

Post by corysama »

djent wrote: post #185
Animats wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the "sweat of the brow" copyright argument, and it has been rejected in by US courts.

The parent is complaining of amount of effort put into the work but should be justifying that each of those steps was a creative decision by a human which contributed to the end result.

With ControlNet and LatentCouple you are doing straight-up set direction. With Loras you are casting, costuming and directing the film/lens/lighting.

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

#203

Post by pmoriarty »

dragonwriter wrote: post #189
pmoriarty wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, because that's pretty much what a "right" is: a definition. They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.

> They’re only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, A priori truths are, exactly and only, those things that are true by definition (and only exist within a particular axiomatic framework.) You’ve described exactly why rights can only be a priori , but used it to deny that they are. > They don’t exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence. I…

I think the difficulty we're having in communicating here is that I'm not using "a priori" in the Kantian sense as being in contrast to "a posteriori", but rather in the colloquial sense of "having a prior existence".

It's also irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make how or whether humans have knowledge of some pre-existing things (through experience or through some other means).

Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have to differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and because they've essentially been brainwashed in to thinking that way through education, socialization, the media, peer pressure, parenting, etc..

So my view and Kant's view on this differ significantly, and while I give him credit for these terms, I don't subscribe to his views and don't feel bound to use these terms in the way Kant or Kantians would have me use them.

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

#204

Post by person3 »

chii wrote: post #149
jay_kyburz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. But what if the prompter then takes the AI text, changes some of the rhymes, perhaps adds a word here or there, does it suddenly come back under copyright.

Let's take it to the extreme - if you randomly outputted noise as a picture, that picture is not copyrightable (or ditto with random letters/numbers and printed it as a book). It feels to me that the copyright office is using this similar line of logic, to make the claim that the resultant work is not copyrightable if it was wholly generated using _only_ a prompt and an AI.

It's a bit odd though. What if you built your own ML model and trained it over a set of data that your wrote yourself. Would the work generated by the AI based of your prompts be not be copyrightable?

The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.

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

#205

Post by kube-system »

shagie wrote: post #158
kube-system wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ques…

You are right, but AI products are basically all currently being pitched as if that is unnecessary.

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

#206

Post by iainctduncan »

statop wrote: post #172
mikehollinger wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.

A bit more like a sampler than a xerox machine... but sampling laws got clarified eventually too!

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

#207

Post by BarryMilo »

jxcole wrote: post #124
techdragon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

I think it's possible that some generous person determines a sequence of prompts that generate, say novels, and then pipes these prompts into a program causing thousands or even millions of wholly varied novels to be generated in the public domain. I imagine this is what the OP meant.

I've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few weeks.

I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.

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

#208

Post by provenance »

techdragon wrote: post #113
yafbum wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still hoping it stays that way. That'd be a fantastic direction for works in the public domain.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

Did you intend to summon me, instead of the word providence?

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

#209

Post by erlkonig »

The big clue here, is that if we allow generated content to be copyrighted, then some asshat company will just generate All The Things (within, say, a given space) and copyright them (likewise for trademarks and patents, which could be much easier to exhaust within defined spaces). Combined with the lifetime of companies and the preposterous copyright extensions granted to them, swaths of human-generated work could be excluded from copyright, blocked by some hidden trove of copyrighted machine output. Especially bad if someone manages to copyright everything that could be generated by some AI.

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

#210

Post by dragonwriter »

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”.

> 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?

The 8 hours doesn’t matter. By the USCO’s ruling, iterative prompt refinement probably wouldn’t, but that’s not super clear (partially, because the USCO’s description of what the model is doing justifying its determination is a fundamentally strained metaphor, so while its clear how it applies to the exact case it describes, its not clear how it generalizes.)

If you are fine-tuning a model (LORA, Checkpoint, whatever), then your input isn’t just a prompt to the model (once or in an iterative process with review of the output), so, your pretty far outside of where the ruling provides clear guidance.

> and have done a bunch of in painting,

inpainting is probably the thing most (even though it again involves prompting, it involves specific selection of where within the image to apply that based on aesthetic concerns) similar to the traditional creative parts of visual art, and the strongest argument given the shape of the USCO description of its rule.

But, I have a feeling that that a rule that appeals to tradition and vague analogy to lower tech visual techniques probably won’t be anywhere close to the final word on copyrightability in this space.

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