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Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

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Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#41

Post by sebastiennight »

benjismith wrote: post #30
dev1ycan wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would copyright and patents exist when the US blatantly stole the entire world's knowledge to train their AI models (and China distillled from it)

Knowledge cannot be "stolen"

You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation.

Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#42

Post by oblio »

pizzly wrote: post #39
sva_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Content that is entirely generated [...] Take note of the qualifier entirely . If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.

Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.

Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#43

Post by freeone3000 »

pizzly wrote: post #27
jefftk wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't actually work. Say you took a book and used an AI to translate it into another language. The translation wouldn't have an additional copyright, the way it would if a human had done the work, but the output would still be restricted by the original copyright. So the presence of the watermark does not tell you that the text is public domain.

I thought translations can be copyrighted separately. Their are translators for instance who translate very old texts from other countries/languages and then sell that book/translation using copyright to protect this business models? Not sure but does this mean if you as a human wrote a book in English and then used AI to translate to another language say French then that translated work would not be copyrighted. Not…

Translation, in and of itself, is viewed as a creative work. A translated work has two copyrights: the original, and the translation, with permission needed from all rightsholders to redistribute. A new translation of a public domain work (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey) has one copyright holder, the translator. An existing work (the English translation of The Three Body Problem) has at least two: the original author and the translator.

However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#44

Post by jongjong »

> When you put your name on an article that's written by ChatGPT or Claude, you're basically putting a provenance mark on it saying: I take responsibility for this. I haven't written it, but I'm putting my name on it. That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content

If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too.

Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".

So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'.

MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright).

The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way.

If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here since the person running the agent has been factored out (just as they were during inference). Also, the agent is not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#45

Post by koolala »

sva_ wrote: post #33
pizzly wrote: post #21

As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the fut…

> Content that is entirely generated [...] Take note of the qualifier entirely . If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.

Is working with an agent different than constantly editing an image with fine tuning prompts? Both can be entirely generated.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#46

Post by Eridrus »

pizzly wrote: post #21

As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the fut…

This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it).

If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.

And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.

We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#47

Post by gruez »

sebastiennight wrote: post #41
benjismith wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge cannot be "stolen"

You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation. Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?

"eavesdropped"?

"spied"?

Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#48

Post by mitaphane »

sebastiennight wrote: post #41
benjismith wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge cannot be "stolen"

You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation. Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?

learned

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#49

Post by koolala »

sebastiennight wrote: post #41
benjismith wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowledge cannot be "stolen"

You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and located the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation. Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?

The crime there is using that knowledge illegally to break in.

Re: Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

#50

Post by semiquaver »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #19
chungusamongus wrote: post #9

The same is true in the US. This is a nothing burger.

It hadn’t been established yet in the EU. It would be a big deal if it went the other way in Europe so it being the same isn’t a nothing burger.

It hasn’t been established in the US either, despite how desperately some people want to misinterpret the handful of cases so far.
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