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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

#102
post #70

Create an “assign copyright” skill? I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?

> I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?

Why would it? It’s generated by blending together ~ every bit of content on the internet and in books that they could steal. Why would the operator of the blending machine suddenly get copyright?

Does a gambler own the copyright on the symbols generated by a slot machine?

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

#103
post #85

Does a photo/image that generated/modified by a human-being using photoshop got protected by copyright? I think previously someone does this...

Yes it does because there's is still direct control from a human. When working with LLMs, even interactive prompting does not provide that level of control.

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

#104

So this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.

It will be interesting if or when someone tries to enforce that perspective. Good luck proving an online contributor used AI on a merge request.

Perhaps we'll have new iterations of FOSS licenses to adjust to legal declarations.

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

#105
Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German.

They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way).

If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its own independent copyright, but (based on other long established principles of copyright) it would still be a derived work of the original, so even if this decision holds it would not be legal to make unauthorised AI translations, pirate authorised AI translations, make further translations into other languages (or back to English), etc.

Which seems fairly reasonable! But consider:

If you start with, say, a 90,000 word novel, and ask for a translated novel, you (presumably) have sufficient rights to stop someone making unauthorised copies of the AI translated version.

If you start with a 300 word prompt, and ask for a logo, you (apparently) do not have sufficient rights to stop someone from using it without authorisation.

So some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point between these two extremes, and I think it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are. Like, in theory you could graph input size versus output complexity, and sketch a frontier between "the author's protected expression survives in the output" and "the author's protected expression does not survive in the output". And I don't have the slightest idea what I think a fair frontier would look like.

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

#107
post #105

Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German. They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way). If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its ow…

> Some combination of the input (0.3k vs 90k) and the output (logo versus novel) crosses an inflection point, and it's interesting to wonder what the boundaries are

It has always been like that though. Copyright is just that arbitrary. You really can't tell if Android violates Oracle's copyright over Java by reading law text.

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

#108

Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain. Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like: If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result. You c…

Seems about right. Copyright is supposed to literally prevent outright copying. The output from an LLM is not a creative work of the prompter. It's genuinely the opposite, I use them when I don't care about something but have to do it anyway for whatever reason. It makes more time for me to do the things I like working on.

It feels shitty that they have been trained on the life sums of all of our work and online presences with absolutely no credit given... But then again, I'm not sure I'd want to know what parts of the weights were from me and which weren't.

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

#109
post #85

Does a photo/image that generated/modified by a human-being using photoshop got protected by copyright? I think previously someone does this...

Year ago, there was a painter, Thomas Kinkade, the "Painter of light". He became a bit of a pop phenomenon, with stores dedicated to selling high quality prints of his works. And one of the things, so I'm told, that could happen, was that you could buy one of his prints, but someone at the store, an artist, would dab some paint onto the print. Add some "light" to it. Obviously this is a commercial endeavor, so I doub…

I believe those are called “embellishments”, and they’re semi-common as a way to make a print “unique”, but still cost way less than the original the print was copied from. From the couple artists I talked to about them, their students do these at their studios, rather than the artist themselves.

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

#110
post #105

Interesting thought experiment is to consider an author who writes a novel in English, but wants to translate it into German. They have a copyright on the original, and if they hire a human, the human would have a copyright on the translation (which would generally be licensed or transferred back to the author in some way). If they use an AI for the translation, by the logic here, the translation wouldn't have its ow…

I don't see why the author of the 300-word prompt couldn't claim copyright of it.
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