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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

#351

Post by HPsquared »

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…

You mean to say he's a con artist?

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

#352

Post by ayewo »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #330
amon22 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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?

That’s easy: corporate firewalls that block all traffic to openai.com, its subdomains and the IP ranges used by GitHub Copilot.

Enterprises that care about exfiltration of code from their internal networks (e.g. banks and other heavily regulated entities) typically hand out computers that are locked down to their employees, including developers. So any engineer that wants to install the GitHub Copilot extension or indeed any non-approved third party extension from the VSCode Marketplace will first have a word with the folks in IT.

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

#354

Post by zirgs »

dublinben wrote: post #223
visarga wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This position statement makes it clear that only the manual details themselves merit protection, the base image itself must be disclaimed from the copyright registration. It would be fraud to attempt otherwise.

If I use controlnet and openpose to generate a character in the exact pose that I want - what does count as a manual detail then?

So with some custom LoRAs to maintain consistent appearance of characters and controlnet/openpose to pose characters exactly like I want I could make a comic book.

Would my work be copyrightable then?

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

#355

Post by dragonwriter »

Retric wrote: post #320
dragonwriter wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities. But that actually reinforces the idea that all of the creative work is in the prompt, everything else is purely mechanical process implementing the command given by the prompt. Arguably, its analogous to saying that a programmer can copyright the prompt but not th…

Compilers don’t create a new copyright the output is covered as a derivative work. However, derivative works have clear limitations and the output of a chat program doesn’t qualify any more than you own the copyright of what someone says when you interview them. Put another way you don’t own the copyright on the specific shape of a tree as a sculpture because you selected its species when you planted it.

> Compilers don’t create a new copyright the output is covered as a derivative work.

A derivative work is a separate work that, considered apart from the one it is derived from, separately has the required creative input to be a copyrightable work, and it does, in fact, have a separate copyright from the original (creating derivative works is an exclusive, but licensable, right of the copyright holder of the original, but the copyright of a derivative is separate.)

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

#356

Post by antibasilisk »

pmoriarty wrote: post #188
antibasilisk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.

"pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute" That's overstating it a bit.. but it is likely we'll get there within the next decade or so. Currently there's still a lot of art that's hard for AI to mimic effectively, and only certain types of art can be created quickly and without much effort using AI. The above is based on my experience of creating well over 5000 images in…

You're neglecting the fact that the types of art that can be created quickly are the ones that make up the bulk of the training data, which are also the types of art most people will want to make.

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

#357

Post by antibasilisk »

exodust wrote: post #254
antibasilisk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Digital art as a whole has already been made worthless by the creation of diffusion models, whether there is copyright on them really doesn't matter at that point, because pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce in under a minute.

> pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce What? That's not true at all! If you're talking about "art", most artists are fussy and want things exactly right. They will spend a long time tweaking the image, or combining different images, painting, processing, pixel-pushing to get the thing they imagined. If you're talking about some random need for an image of a "horse with metal legs", and…

There is plenty of ability to tweak AI images, I don't understand this objection.

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

#358

Post by BoxOfRain »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #322
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…

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

Perhaps it interpreted it as more along the lines of 'write a story exhibiting features that are Kafkaesque'.

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

#359

Post by marcus_holmes »

nextlevelwizard wrote: post #243
marcus_holmes wrote: post #52

Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly /s) Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems. It'll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though: If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be o…

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

Good question. I assume the methods they're using to determine if an essay is written by an AI won't work on code?

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

#360

Post by marcus_holmes »

ayewo wrote: post #352
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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? That’s easy: corporate firewalls that block all traffic to openai.com, its subdomains and the IP ranges used by GitHub Copilot. Enterprises that care about exfiltration of code from their internal networks (e.g. banks and o…

yeah but you could get the AI to write the code on your personal laptop, then copy it over to the work laptop.

I can see this being a thing.. "I have three jobs as Senior Engineer for three different organisations. All I do is copy code from an AI engine to my work laptop all day"

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