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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

#211

Post by dllthomas »

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…

It's not clear to me that this position is wrong, but it seems wildly inconsistent with our policy that every photograph I take is protected by copyright, no matter how inane and low effort. I have images I generated with Craiyon (then Dall-E Mini) into which I put way more creative effort than any of the photos on my phone.

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

#212

Post by visarga »

Stratoscope wrote: post #198
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…

> “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare” Oh, this can be fun. “Write a story about copyright law in the style of Franz Kafka.” In a world that was both strange and familiar, a man named Josef K found himself entangled in a complex web of legal disputes. It all started when he received a letter from a law firm claiming that he had violated copyright law by using an image on his blog wit…

yeah, it has that GPT style, sounds like a rushed story

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

#213

Post by alphanullmeric »

Unpopular opinion : the government shouldn’t protect your art from getting used as training data. The government shouldn’t protect your generated art from being copied. Intellectual property is not real property. Nothing is being taken from you. Force is only justified in response to force, and you don’t get the right to throw someone in jail for “stealing” something you still have.

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

#214

Post by visarga »

BarryMilo wrote: post #207
jxcole wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

same with art and code

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

#216

Post by pmoriarty »

Riverheart wrote: post #180
pmoriarty wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if databases are copyrightable because they represent curation, then software must be too." 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 dat…

I'll just go ahead and say Readymades aren't art and express my belief that the artistic community will survive the copyright loss of loosely arranged furniture so we can avoid justifying the current state of affairs with avante garde silliness. John Cage made a musical piece 4'33 which is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence which has as much to do with music as Readymades do with art. His other works include curated…

I've yet to find a better definition of art than that of Andy Warhol, who said "art is what you can get away with." Considering that both Duchamp and Cage got away with convincing the world that their work is art, it is.

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

#217

Post by visarga »

dragonwriter wrote: post #163
famouswaffles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also don’t overlook that this is a “solely a prompt”; real non-trivial workflows for systems like SD (MJ I’ve used less) are different than “solely a prompt” and may or may not result in the same result even at the Copyright Office level.

Add one manual detail here and there on the image, they will have copyright protection.

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

#218

Post by Semaphor »

visarga wrote: post #212
Stratoscope wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare” Oh, this can be fun. “Write a story about copyright law in the style of Franz Kafka.” In a world that was both strange and familiar, a man named Josef K found himself entangled in a complex web of legal disputes. It all started when he received a letter from a law firm claiming that he had violated copyright law by using an image on his blog wit…

yeah, it has that GPT style, sounds like a rushed story

It’s a decent start, but everything is just cheap. Lots of low-hanging fruits, ignoring anything higher up. In a way, it’s like as if I, someone who doesn’t enjoy writing, and is bad at it, wrote the story.

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

#219

Post by visarga »

dllthomas wrote: post #211
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…

It's not clear to me that this position is wrong, but it seems wildly inconsistent with our policy that every photograph I take is protected by copyright, no matter how inane and low effort. I have images I generated with Craiyon (then Dall-E Mini) into which I put way more creative effort than any of the photos on my phone.

Take a photo of your screen! BAM. solved

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

#220

Post by laserbeam »

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…

> these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist

I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However, today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company not own copyright for work produced by its employees?

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