Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be down to contract/terms of service. You’d be in breach of that, not copyright
But is it enforceable? Companies can put in contracts all kind of nonsense, it doesn't mean all of it is unconditionally enforceable, right? Ie. if somebody creates company that sells milkshakes and they say you can't use them to feed employees of competing milkshakes companies - it wouldn't fly, would it?
AI weights are not open “source”
231–240 of 274 posts
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
On photography, the argument was condensed into "who pushed the button". We saw it with the monkey auto-portrait copyright fight where copyright was not granted to the photographer, and other nature photography using photo traps where the copyright stuck with the human basically because they were the last operator of the camera. The interesting part is, those controversial case are pretty recent when the art of photo…
Eh? The copyright was the photographers and not the monkeys. https://petapixel.com/2018/04/24/photographer-wins-monkey-se...
https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-...
313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship
As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.
The U.S. Copyright Office will not register works produced by nature, animals, or plants. Likewise, the Office cannot register a work purportedly created by divine or supernatural beings, although the Office may register a work where the application or the deposit copy(ies) state that the work was inspired by a divine spirit.
Examples:
• A photograph taken by a monkey.
• A mural painted by an elephant.
...
Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1966).Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#233Model weights are not source code, but data. Arguably because of how they are generated, they are not even copyrightable at all.
OK but I mean it's functionally a kind of machine code for a strange machine with a neural transformer architecture, like a 'binary blob'. It's outside of the paradigm where machine code is created only by compilation of copyrightable source code written by humans following their creative "aha moment".
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
On photography, the argument was condensed into "who pushed the button". We saw it with the monkey auto-portrait copyright fight where copyright was not granted to the photographer, and other nature photography using photo traps where the copyright stuck with the human basically because they were the last operator of the camera. The interesting part is, those controversial case are pretty recent when the art of photo…
Eh? The copyright was the photographers and not the monkeys. https://petapixel.com/2018/04/24/photographer-wins-monkey-se...
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to…
> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI ima…
The output is not.
The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice.
Just because you don't feel you put in a lot of consideration does not mean at a fundamental level that you still put in creative choices that give the resulting product copyright protection.
But if you took that photo and put it into software which made a derivative image without human creativity, then while the original image would be copyrightable the resulting derivative output would not.
The ideal path forward in copyright would be no infringement in use of materials for training and no protection in AI output with infringement possible against output too close/derivative of protected images.
It's not infringement if you learned to draw tracing Mickey Mouse, your Gerry Gerbil cartoons are fine, but if you draw Mickey Mouse and distribute it, you'll hear from Disney's lawyers.
AI should be the same with the exception that the Gerry Gerbil cartoons would not be copyrightable.
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
On photography, the argument was condensed into "who pushed the button". We saw it with the monkey auto-portrait copyright fight where copyright was not granted to the photographer, and other nature photography using photo traps where the copyright stuck with the human basically because they were the last operator of the camera. The interesting part is, those controversial case are pretty recent when the art of photo…
Eh? The copyright was the photographers and not the monkeys. https://petapixel.com/2018/04/24/photographer-wins-monkey-se...
- whether the monkey has the copyright (PETA's argument): this was smacked down by the court twice, the second court explicitely setting a precedent.
- whether the photograph has coypright: as far as I know he doesn't, as the work was deemed non copyrightable (ruled as not created by a human)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI ima…
Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable. The output is not. The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice. Just because you don't feel you put in a lot of consideration does not mean at a fundamental level that you still put in creative choices that give the resulting product copyright protection. But if you took that photo and put it into software which made a de…
Excellent! I'll put the Inheritance Cycle through a synonymiser, and have a copyright-free (if somewhat degraded) version. Take that, Christopher Paolini!
… wait.
What you say might well be correct: the law is often foolish. But I'd imagine the creativity-free derivative work still counts as a derivative work of the original, copyright-eligible work.
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Outputs from LLMs, machine generated art, and machine generated music probably are not copyrightable either. I don't have a strong sense of whether this is reasonable (I see arguments both ways) but I do think it's pretty strongly at odds with how we treat photographs. There are a bunch of photos on my phone where I unquestionably own the copyright, despite putting in much less creativity than I did for some AI ima…
Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable. The output is not. The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice. Just because you don't feel you put in a lot of consideration does not mean at a fundamental level that you still put in creative choices that give the resulting product copyright protection. But if you took that photo and put it into software which made a de…
I can't legally pirate Windows just because the source code was run through a compiler. Even though the compiler itself adds no additional creativity, the underlying source code is still a creative work[0], so pirating the binaries still infringes a copyright. Just one that's in a slightly different place than what we're normally used to thinking about.
Just to drive the point home, there's a few other situations in which copyright "flows through" to things not subject to copyright. Back in the days of copyright formalities, if you published before properly registering something, your work would be born into the public domain. And this occasionally happened to serial media - e.g. someone might just forget to register the third season of a TV show. In that particular case[1], seasons one and two are still copyrighted, and because season three is a derivative work of the prior season, nobody but the original owner can actually make any use of season three. The only practical difference is that the company that owns that TV show lost one year of copyright ownership over the third season.
[0] By definitions of law. I honestly think most software shouldn't have been made copyrightable, but once Congress said "software is copyrightable" that put that question to bed.
[1] I don't remember the name of the TV show or the court case, but this IS a thing that happened and this theory IS court tested.
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#239The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. If they're not, then presumably "available weights", "ethical weights", and "open weights" are all the same: open weights. Either your weights are under NDA and presumably considered to be a trade secret, or they are public, and the words in your "license" mean absolutely nothing? That seems like…
> The complexity described seems to be resting on the unestablished idea that weights are copyrightable in the first place. Yes. Weights probably aren't copyrightable in the US. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone, in which the Supreme Court ruled that telephone directories are not copyrightable. The copyright clause in the Constitution ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to…
Maybe a published copy of the weights might be copyrightable, in the exact form of a “creatively” ordered listing, but the weights themselves would almost certainly not be if the US judicial system rules consistently.
This bypasses the entire argument of whether it is human authorship as weights themselves in bulk are just straight up non-copyrightable regardless of origin according to this reading of the law and precedent.
Re: AI weights are not open “source”
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your prompt for the AI image generation is copyrightable. The output is not. The photo you take involved choices of composition and timing and equipment choice. Just because you don't feel you put in a lot of consideration does not mean at a fundamental level that you still put in creative choices that give the resulting product copyright protection. But if you took that photo and put it into software which made a de…
> then while the original image would be copyrightable the resulting derivative output would not. Excellent! I'll put the Inheritance Cycle through a synonymiser, and have a copyright-free (if somewhat degraded) version. Take that, Christopher Paolini! … wait. What you say might well be correct: the law is often foolish. But I'd imagine the creativity-free derivative work still counts as a derivative work of the orig…