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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

#321

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#322

Post by beepbooptheory »

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…

But this does not read like Kafka at all... Am I missing a joke here?

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

#323

Post by reset-password »

amon22 wrote: post #316
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you determine if code is written by an AI?

This does not really matter in practice. The risk of legal sanctions is too high for most businesses, they will follow the law. This is kind of similar to pirate software, businesses almost never use them even if they could definitely get away with it in most cases. The issue is that a single angry former employee is all it takes to make your life hell. This is even more true for large organizations where many people…

In practice, the larger the organization the less likely the potential legal sanctions are to dissuade them. My observation has been that once an organization (in the US anyway) grows large enough it is in a special protected status where no real penalties can come to it and there is certainly no risk of exposure to criminal charges for the decision makers.

Source: front page here every single day.

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

#324

Post by Retric »

pmoriarty wrote: post #191
Retric wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can own the copyright to the prompt used to generate the output. But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities. I clearly don’t own the copyright to my Google search results even if my query is quite unique.

The essay that has helped me most to think about this sort of thing has been Brian Eno's Composers as Gardeners .[1] It's about music, but I think it applies equally well to AI-generated art, where humans collaborate by writing the algorithms, choosing the subjects, providing the prompts, and curating the results. Here's an excerpt: "...essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that…

Simply planting a tree doesn’t give you copyright of the shape the tree ends up in the way you would on a sculpture.

That’s been the case for a very long time, you need significant control over the specific output because it quantifies. A garden is copyrightable based on the layout of the plants when that involved creativity.

That’s been a legal distinction for a very long time, and this statement is simply consistent with that history.

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

#325

Post by beepbooptheory »

hnbad wrote: post #312
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.

There is no such thing as private property. It's a fiction enforced with the threat of violence. It's even fairly recent as a concept. If we agree that private property should exist, "it's not real" is not a good argument for why intellectual property shouldn't exist. Not all violations of private property have to be stealing. If I sleep in the empty house you own, that is trespass even if I don't cause any physical…

Private property !== personal possessions. I, for one, don't agree private property should exist, just like intellectual property. There is no place in the future for such concepts, they all feel quite antiquated.

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

#326

Post by brookst »

hakre wrote: post #138
brookst wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

software works are normally subject to copyright without much further ado. database works are more commonly subject to rights _similar_ to copyright, but often a class of work in its own right.

The US has for IP protections: copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret. There is no “similar to” copyright.

Databases can be copyrightable. Not all are, but to the extent IP protection extends to databases it will virtually always be copyright, with maybe an occasional trade secret (which is almost the opposite of copyright)

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

#327

Post by nextlevelwizard »

yipbub wrote: post #279
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In universe of perfectly slippery spherical cows, I wouldn't mind. However, in this universe bikes experience wear, I wouldn't be able to spontaneously decide to use it, etc.

You writing a shitty knock off Harry Potter novel "wears" on the brand. Just think your favorite book, movie, or music and think if you would enjoy it if there was really no way to know what was real work and what was just some copy-cat or straight up scammer selling rubbish. Now it is easy; you can not publish your Harry Potter novel due to copyright.

Put it in another way: to become a author in a world where copyright is not a thing is pretty much impossible. Either you have to sell your book digitally with draconian DRM - and you will still get your book stolen or you have to own your own print shop, because if you send your book to any publisher they can just take your work and publish it as their own.

And let's be real the amount your bike wears out from me riding it to the shop and back is so negligible that it won't make a difference in the life span of the bike.

There are good reasons to have copyright - however I do not like how long the copyright is. I've stated it before that in my mind good copyright would be something like 10-20 years or life time of the author whatever comes later. This would allow any creative to hold the right to their world/characters/whatever until they are gone and it wouldn't discourage them from publishing in their old age since even after they have passed their families would still benefit from the works for sometime.

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

#328

Post by nextlevelwizard »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #298
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell me you have never done anything creative in your life without telling me you have never done anything creative in your life.

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

#329

Post by hermannj314 »

In the studio, the photographer directs the lighting, the model, tweaks the shot, issues commands to modify the scene, presses a button, checks the outputs, iterates, chooses the best shot.

In a virtual conversation, the promptographer directs the computer to set the tone, chooses their model, tweaks the inputs, issues commands to change the virtual parameters, presses a few buttons, checks the outputs, iterates, and takes the best output.

One of these is a creative work guided by a tool and one is a act that shows no human creative authorship at all.

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

#330

Post by nextlevelwizard »

amon22 wrote: post #316
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you determine if code is written by an AI?

This does not really matter in practice. The risk of legal sanctions is too high for most businesses, they will follow the law. This is kind of similar to pirate software, businesses almost never use them even if they could definitely get away with it in most cases. The issue is that a single angry former employee is all it takes to make your life hell. This is even more true for large organizations where many people…

I have two thoughts about this.

First is who cares about large corporations? Sure large corporations have the money to buy licensed software, but I know plenty of small-to-medium corporations that operate on pirated software.

Second is your statement doesn't mean anything at all. Yes, you can enact a policy in your corporation that no one is allowed to use AI tools like Copilot to write code, but how do you monitor this? How do you know if some developer did use Copilot? This all feels like complete lip service with no actual force behind it. I am 100% sure that even my corporation's code base already contains stuff written with help of an AI, but there is also no question that the code is fully copyrighted.

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