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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

191–200 of 415 posts

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

#191
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of control that prompt crafting alone gives you. There's also the choice of which version of midjourney to use, and various meta options that it gives you. The copyright office clearly has not the slightest clue about what they're talking about when they claim that the AI is the sole creator here. AI generated content has always been a collaboration with humans, and there's always human creativity invol…

You can own the copyright to the prompt used to generate the output. But the algorithm isn’t collaborating, every possible outcome is fixed when the algorithm is finalized and users can’t actually change the possibilities. I clearly don’t own the copyright to my Google search results even if my query is quite unique.

The essay that has helped me most to think about this sort of thing has been Brian Eno's Composers as Gardeners.[1] It's about music, but I think it applies equally well to AI-generated art, where humans collaborate by writing the algorithms, choosing the subjects, providing the prompts, and curating the results.

Here's an excerpt:

"...essentially the idea there is that one is making a kind of music in the way that one might make a garden. One is carefully constructing seeds, or finding seeds, carefully planting them and then letting them have their life. And that life isn't necessarily exactly what you'd envisaged for them. It's characteristic of the kind of work that I do that I'm really not aware of how the final result is going to look or sound. So in fact, I'm deliberately constructing systems that will put me in the same position as any other member of the audience. I want to be surprised by it as well. And indeed, I often am.

"What this means, really, is a rethinking of one's own position as a creator. You stop thinking of yourself as me, the controller, you the audience, and you start thinking of all of us as the audience, all of us as people enjoying the garden together. Gardener included.

"We're used to the idea, coming from the industrial and very intelligent post-Enlightenment history that we have, we're used to the idea that the great triumph of humans is their ability to control. And indeed, that must be the case, to some extent.

"What we're not so used to is the idea that another great gift we have is the talent to surrender and to cooperate. Cooperation and surrender are actually parts of the same skill. To be able to surrender is to be able to know when to stop trying to control. And to know when to go with things, to be taken along by them. And that's a skill that we actually have to start relearning. Our hubris about our success in terms of being controllers has made us overlook that side of our abilities. So we're so used to dignifying controllers that we forget to dignify surrenderers...

"...my idea about art as gardening is to sort of revivify that discussion and to say let's accept the role of gardener as being equal in dignity to the role of architect, as in fact, is shown in this lovely pavilion here."

[1] - https://www.edge.org/conversation/brian_eno-composers-as-gar...

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

#192

How does this affect programming? Does this mean if a program was built using GitHub Copilot, that in order to have copyright on software, you have to explain that to the copyright office?

Maybe similar to how software is affected today by open source, by providing attribution.

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

#193

Not possible to reliably tell apart. The Image generation scene is one thing. For a lot of output, there are still some tells. Text generation though...well good luck ever finding that out.

Government just found a way to expand itself and give out wages for a job that they cannot really do.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all…

People might not be honest. But large organizations, oh boy. There's zero way Disney will want any chance for their materials to not be copyrightable. If the Copyright office's view on this stands, there will be no great disruption of the employability of creatives.

True. Though I wonder what will happen when someone sells a wildly successful novel to a publisher for millions of dollars, and then it turns out that it was composed by an AI.

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

#195
post #89
post #40

It's all well and good that the copyright office deems that protection only applies to the parts of the work where a human was in control of the traditional elements of authorship, and that there is a duty to disclose the use of generative technologies ... but now one can plausibly assert that they are the sole author of a work which was produced by one of these models, and be 100% confident that no one can dispute t…

And it doesn't matter because anyone can use the AI to produce thousands of similar images with little effort. All those tools have randomization so they don't produce the exact same image for the exact same prompt. The value of an image produced by AI is very low because the cost to produce it is very low. No point in committing federal fraud by falsely claim you made them. > no one can dispute that Of course I can…

> I can even prove you didn't make the AI image by asking you to produce a work of similar quality under supervision.

Have you ever seen a court do anything even remotely similar to this other than in Hollywood movies? Not only would there be serious freedom of expression/compelled speech aspects to doing that, it would be entirely impractical and ultimately prove nothing.

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

#196
Would this not apply to tons of procedural generation tech as well (used in plenty of games and tons of movies)? We give it a bunch of elements and write algorithms to do the generation... but we are ultimately not the ones putting pen to paper so to speak.

I think this is the 100% the right call, some small level of human effort should be required otherwise what is to stop a few individuals from mass copywriting 10 million images and suing everyone that produces something substantially similar.

Having said that, there may be odd knock on effects at play here.

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

#197

If this is the logic, then corporations should lose personhood because they can't have it both ways. I don't see the rationale because ultimately there are owners of copyright, whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection whether it was paint thrown against a wall, AI generation, or some poor human painting with hummingbird eyelashes.

> whereas the creation process should be immaterial to protection

On the contrary, the US position has been for a very, very, long time that the creation process is the only thing that's material to protection. The result is not the thing that matters.

Corporations can own copyright not because they're human beings, but because the copyrighted work was originally generated by a human being's creative expression. There's no contradiction or having it both ways here: this isn't a set of guidance about who can own copyright, it's a set of guidance about what can generate copyright.

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

#198

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

> “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 without permission.

Josef K was bewildered by this accusation. He had always believed that his use of the image was fair and reasonable, and he had no idea how he could have infringed on anyone's rights. Nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before a tribunal to defend himself against these charges.

The tribunal was a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with endless corridors and dimly lit rooms. Josef K wandered through the maze, trying to find the right office, but every door he opened led to another hallway or another set of stairs.

Eventually, he found himself standing before a stern judge who peered down at him from behind a towering desk. The judge had a sour expression on his face and a stack of papers in front of him.

"Mr. K," the judge said, "you stand accused of violating copyright law. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

Josef K stammered nervously, trying to explain his side of the story. But the judge cut him off.

"You do not understand," the judge said, "the law is the law, and it must be obeyed. Your intentions are irrelevant. You are guilty simply by virtue of having used the image without permission."

Josef K tried to protest, but the judge was unmoved. He handed down a verdict of guilty, and ordered Josef K to pay a hefty fine and remove the image from his blog.

Josef K left the courtroom feeling confused and defeated. He had always believed that he was a law-abiding citizen, but now he found himself caught in a nightmarish world where the rules made no sense and justice was arbitrary.

As he wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of the tribunal, Josef K realized that he would never be able to escape the clutches of copyright law. He was trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where even the slightest misstep could result in a crushing blow from an inscrutable legal system.

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

#199
post #68
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timing is only one aspect of creativity. In most settings a video camera’s output is copyrighted because of how you select the location and angel to film. Motion capture has all of those elements, and simply doesn’t capture 99.9% of the possible images. ie: Someone picked a log crossing the river as a place where something interesting will happen and they setup the shot to look interesting. Which is the general argum…

How is setting up a motion camera on a log not similar to setting up a prompt for ChatGPT?

Yeah, I think in the general case there's going to be a significant amount of selection and arrangement of the works from the AI, though I guess that even then none of the underlying images (or such) of the AI get protection.

I wonder if they know about the "inpainting" technique where the human generates an image, erases parts of it, then adds another image and has the AI fill in the blanks and make a new image based on the resulting image?

I think that'd be harder to disentangle the way they do right now to say these parts are copyrightable because the human did them and those parts are not because the AI did them since you can't really separate the inputs at that point.

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

#200

> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's un…

Based on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.

No. You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles.

If a monkey steals your camera and takes a selfy you can’t copyright that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...

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