Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copyright does not protect AI-generated content in EU

mathstodon.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 225 posts

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

#121

Post by thevinter »

trickypr wrote: post #66
jmward01 wrote: post #57

I don't see an easy test here. Worse, I see the beginnings of a test that is technical and very likely to not match the future of how we will interact with these things. We have to start somewhere but I'm not sure 'Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.' is the right place to start. I think we need more examples of what does constitute '…

I think there is an easy test: if you didn’t write it, it’s not yours. If we go back 10 years and your friend says “I have an idea for an app, here it is,” and you build it, you own the copyright because you wrote it. You give an idea to the pile of math calculated of the stolen work of humanity, the math owns it (which it can’t, so no one owns it). No matter how detailed of a conversation you have with a friend, I d…

What if an artist programs a programs a carving robot to create a sculpture? How is that meaningfully different?

Based on your logic that should not qualify, but it currently clearly does: https://quayola.com/selected-unfinished-sculptures/

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

#122

Post by kazinator »

Suppose that an artist trains an AI model purely on their own works, and then the AI generates something similar to that artist's work. I would say that the artist must be allowed to assert copyright over that. The artist has copyright over all the training data, and the output of the AI is a derived work of that.

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

#123

Post by somenameforme »

xoa wrote: post #78
randyrand wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a terrible ruling. It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams) there isn't even "a button." Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.

> It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams), there isn't even "a button". I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generat…

Thinking more about monkeys, I think that case was made relatively easy because there was a normal living recipient for copyright, but that wasn't eligible for such. I'm fairly certain that dashcam footage, which is 100% automated, as you mention, is copyrighted by default. It's a fairly common source of footage of novel events like a meteorite, rocket impact, or whatever else. And that footage is licensed to media companies.

In any case, any country that decides neural network generated media isn't copyrighted then faces a major, and probably impossible, problem of trying to prove it wasn't made by a human.

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

#124

Post by drdexebtjl »

Lazare wrote: 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…

Input size and output complexity are not necessarily the only two dimensions involved. There’s no reason to think that such graph would show a continuous frontier.

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

#125

Post by [deleted] »

harimau777 wrote: post #87
zmmmmm wrote: post #58

it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection? But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be: - I wrote the prompt (not enough) - I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in t…

I'd say that any use of an AI trained on people's creations without (real) consent and compensation should not be protected.

[deleted]

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

#126

Post by Joel_Mckay »

pornel wrote: post #71
socalgal2 wrote: post #65

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.

You can't enforce those licenses against AI-generated parts, because enforcement relies on the recipient having no other way to avoid copyright infringement. However, there's no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects. There's already plenty of non-copyrightable code like auto-generated boilerplate.

>no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects

That is not how copyright/trademark/contract laws work, and isomorphic plagiarism is not a long-term business model. People also loved Napster at first too. Good luck =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004

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

#128

Post by hmry »

zmmmmm wrote: post #58

it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection? But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be: - I wrote the prompt (not enough) - I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in t…

> I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)

Hmm I don't think that would be enough. I'd expect that would only make the modifications themselves copyrightable, but not the whole modified work including the AI parts.

Compare for example the case where the US copyright office ruled that, when assembling AI-generated images and human-written text into a comic book, only the human-made elements themselves (text, arrangement) get copyright protection, but not the images.

E.g. if you generate an AI photo and color grade it, i expect only the color grading would be protected (if that is even significant enough to be protectable), not the rest. And someone else could re-color-grade the same image without infringing your copyright.

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

#129

Post by wotamess »

Does it matter?

The set of possible and desirable non-copyrighted text/audio/visual states to render is effectively infinite. Laws don't prevent Scrabble clones; tropes are not protected.

Endless remixes of public domain content are an option as well.

If an iPhone with model weights in chip, a local Mac mini with similar but more powerful model on chip ends up capable of generating endless content copyrights won't provide a moat.

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

#130

Post by Joel_Mckay »

voxelghost wrote: post #115
socalgal2 wrote: post #65

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.

wasnt there a case a while back, where GPL or LGPL code made its way into MIT licensed software via LLM? And they were forced to remove the copyleft code. I dont remember the details though.

Usually what I have seen is someone writes a Perl library, Claude mostly ports it to Python with isomorphic plagiarism, and a bunch of Brogrammers proclaim "AI" magic is real.

The issue is most GPL license fall under contract law, and scraped code can't legally have assigned "copy" rights on an "AI" vector search compaction output.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhgYMH6n004

Indeed, these rules obviously don't apply in places like India, Russia, Iran, and China. =3

Post reply on HN