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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

#291

Post by barrkel »

mejutoco wrote: post #288
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…

> 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. I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch. It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).

Controls nets also blur the line here. You can start out with a generated image selected from hundreds of samples (human input: curation), do a canny edge detection or fake scribble, then start tweaking and adjusting it to remove elements that over-determine the output, adding or overlaying sketches to add elements, then iterate on prompts, scale up with img2img, fix smaller elements with inpainting, and yet more curation.

And that's before we start talking about finetuned models, model merging, LoRA and so on.

It's too early to say where we will end up with AI generated works. In the search for control over output, there's a lot more creative human input needed today. This is in part down to limitations in the integration of current AI, and a dialog with a chat bot, or even a voice conversation combined with a pointer may be enough to convey intent in the future. We just don't know yet.

I also wonder if there's a parallel with the relationship between modern artists and artisans. For example, many marble sculptures by modern artists are actually carved by artisans in Italy, following directions from the artist. I expect that the artisans are doing work for hire and the copyright is retained by the artist with the idea.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/damien-hirsts-army-of-geppetto...

> “More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with words.”

Sounds like a prompt?

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

#292

Post by mejutoco »

barrkel wrote: post #291
mejutoco wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch. It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).

Controls nets also blur the line here. You can start out with a generated image selected from hundreds of samples (human input: curation), do a canny edge detection or fake scribble, then start tweaking and adjusting it to remove elements that over-determine the output, adding or overlaying sketches to add elements, then iterate on prompts, scale up with img2img, fix smaller elements with inpainting, and yet more cur…

> “More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with words.”

Very interesting too, since a lot of modern artist work like a small company, where they have employees that execute on the artist's vision. The copyright still belongs to the artist, though, because of the employment contract.

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

#293

Post by PeterisP »

mikehollinger wrote: post #159
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. :-)

If I look at how the law is written, I get an impression that technically you might even say that copyright law doesn't exclude non-human authored works - they fit the clause of types of protected work, a machine might be considered an author, etc, HOWEVER, when all that is said and done, a machine can't have any rights or standing in court; i.e. even if someone would assert that a machine is the author of some work and has an exclusive right to reproduce it, then that right is unenforceable because the human society and its courts simply will ignore any violations of a machine's rights.

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

#294

Post by jpe90 »

mejutoco wrote: post #288
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…

> 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. I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch. It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).

Yeah I think people are reading this the wrong way. Software was originally considered unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. § 101, but language was developed to allow software to be patented by narrowing the scope of the claimed inventions to a physical processor which are programmed to contain specific algorithms.

I don't think this is a showstopper in terms of copyright registration of A.I. works, but rather a first step in a back-and-forth process of figuring out the legal structure of how to makes rules and enforcement work.

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

#296

Post by reneberlin »

chatgpt4 summarized:

This is a statement of policy by the U.S. Copyright Office to explain how it examines and registers works that contain material generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The statement is effective from March 16, 2023. The Office has experience and expertise in distinguishing between copyrightable and noncopyrightable works. The Office may require additional information from applicants who use AI to create or use copyrighted works.

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

#297

Post by Aachen »

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.

I was expecting this argument.

I'm sure they're happy to register copyright on a text you wrote yourself and used your imagination on—a prompt. I agree this has creative input on the artist's part and can be tricky to get right. Similarly, if you do significant edits to the result, I'd assume this ought to continue to legally function just like photo editing functioned before AI-generated images.

They're just saying they're not going to copyright what you didn't actually paint or decide on (like the words in each sentence or how to rhyme them, as in their example).

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

#298

Post by alphanullmeric »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #245
alphanullmeric wrote: post #213

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.

Do you also agree that government should not enforce if I borrow your bike while you are not using it if I return it? If not how is that different? You still have the bike and you werent using it while I borrowed it - you just didn’t know I was borrowing it

My bike is real property. Your thoughts are not.

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

#299

Post by gwd »

Aachen wrote: post #297
dragonwriter wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was expecting this argument. I'm sure they're happy to register copyright on a text you wrote yourself and used your imagination on—a prompt. I agree this has creative input on the artist's part and can be tricky to get right. Similarly, if you do significant edits to the result, I'd assume this ought to continue to legally function just like photo editing functioned before AI-generated images. They're just saying…

I think the comparison to photography or electronic music is apt.

If you just open up Garage Band and click a couple of times to enable loop "autofill" chords / rhythm, should that be copyrightable? I'd say probably not; but if you spent a bunch of time tweaking and honing all the parameters to get something unique and interesting, I'd say they should. Should the person then only get the copyright on the Garage Band parameters, but not on the resulting output audio?

Or consider the amount of creativity that goes into most photographs -- it's often nothing more than deciding to take a picture. And yet you have an implicit copyright on every photograph in your phone, just for having made the decision to pick up your phone and click.

Or consider the Copyright Office's comparison to giving instructions to an artist. Yes, if you just said to an artist, "Draw a picture of the Eiffel tower", then the artist should own the copyright. But if you worked closely together with the artist, iterating over dozens of designs and sketches, giving feedback and direction on the creative decisions, then personally I think you should share in the copyright. (Not sure what the law is in this case.)

Similarly, if you spend an hour iterating through dozens of prompts to get the output of a generated image exactly the way you want it, then you're an artist and should be able to get a copyright on that image.

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

#300

Post by gwd »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #229
pmoriarty wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author." "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 sna…

point and shoot is almost certainly copyrighted. eyes closed might not be, (I kind of doubt there's case law here). the bar for originally is pretty low for copyright but it's not zero.

What if someone who's blind just randomly pulls out a camera and takes some snaps (without knowing anything about what might be going on). Do they get a copyright on their photos?
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