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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

#161

Post by unknownfuture »

raincole wrote: post #135
unknownfuture wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine. Have you been involved in copyright or patent litigation? Because it's not that easy.

It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works. Typically a company doesn't need to provide the whole working process and files to the court to claim copyright over their published products / to accuse pirates for violation. If you're on the defendant side of a copyright violation case, it's extremely hard to use "well the original author didn't really make it...* as a defense. (Pa…

> It's usually easier than that, as one by default hold the copyright of their works.

That's not what we're talking about.

This is a question of copyright eligibility in the first place. An excellent recent(ish) example is Oracle v Google wherein the former claimed copyright over the Java APIs. That particular litigation went on for years and ultimately went to the Supreme Court (though it ultimately ended on a fair use argument and the issue of API copyright eligibility was never settled).

We can probably assume similar high profile cases in the future that turn on quantifying the level of human contribution in code produced through the use of AI.

As for patents, it's literally that easy. Attacking authorship of a patent is an excellent way to invalidate it. It's why any company with a serious patent program requires staff to keep supporting notes for their work and confirm authorship in writing as part of the filing process.

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

#162

Post by redwall_hp »

derektank wrote: post #61
semiquaver wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s been established in the DC circuit, where basically any challenges to copyright office decisions would need to be brought. For all intents and purposes, until the Supreme Court or Congress decide to weigh in, it’s pretty well established that AI generated content cannot receive copyright. There will probably be some decisions around the edges regarding when human editorial input might result in a copyright being…

Authorship is also required in the Constitution's section on copyright, and is likely entangled in international treaties. Any change that foundational would probably require a constitutional amendment.

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

#164

Post by somerandom2407 »

hn_submit wrote: post #153

Does this also extend to generated source code? I mean, this upend the business models of many A.I. companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. In addition, many ISVs would probably stop using A.I. if their products could lose their copyright. And what about A.I. generated code which has been altered by a human? Is the derived work copyrightable?

And this is one of the reasons some people are up in arms about Anthropic's recent inclusion of watermarking against anything Claude models touch. It will even take human-generated code that it works on and apply watermarks to it which can be then used to prove it was AI processed and perhaps invalidate any copyright on even human-written code.

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

#165

Post by inigyou »

kijin wrote: post #117
raincole wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's supposed to be arbitrary. Copyright is not some sort of human right or divine commandment that creators have. It's a legal device to incentivize a certain type of behavior. Like tax cuts and subsidies, governments can dangle it in front of people whenever it wants. Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.

All law, in fact, is arbitrary.

I've come to understand that rules are not executable, or not executed. As programmers we understand if we write if(X) {Y} and X happens, Y will.

Laws aren't like that. Laws are just powerful people telling us what we want to do and what they want to do to us if we don't. The difference is subtle: the powerful person's power is not limited by the law. He only writes the law because exercising his power is annoying and he'd prefer that we complied in advance so he doesn't have to. The thing that actually executes is the powerful person's desires, not the law.

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

#166

Post by dijksterhuis »

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.

a bit further down ...

> Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.

which reads like you actually have to contribute by modifying the output from the system, i.e. prompts/inputs to the system do not count as a human contribution.

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

#167

Post by somerandom2407 »

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.

Is it fair to say, then, that artists who have trained on the work of prior artists should also not be able to protect their works unless they have directly received consent and have compensated all the artists whose works they have viewed and potentially learned from over their lifetime?

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

#168

Post by enquirewithin »

wahern wrote: post #157
somenameforme wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Theoretically, in the US dashcam, CCTV, and similar automated recordings are not copyrightable. In the US you can only copyright creative expression. However, the question hasn't been answered in court, yet, AFAIU. That doesn't stop people from treating automated recordings as if they were copyrighted, though. Especially for media companies, licensing is standard operating procedure. Even if a media company's lawyers…

Copyright is automatic upon creation.

Registering a work provides additional benefits.

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

#169

Post by gls2ro »

raincole wrote: post #38
pizzly wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.

(I think) the case depends on what AI watermarks are. As far as I know, things like SynthID has practically zero false positives.

I think you need to provide independent sources for the "SynthID has practically zero false positives". Except a paper written by Google authors about SynthID for images I have not found any study about zero false positives.

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

#170

Post by somerandom2407 »

kazinator wrote: post #122

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.

What do you think should happen if an artist views a lot of arts over their lifetime and then themself generates something similar to another artist's work? I would argue that collectively humans have been standing on the backs of other humans all throughout history. An artist today does not simply come out of the womb knowing how to make great art - they learn it by observing other art, learning about art and practicing (not altogether dissimilar to model training) over many, many hours.
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