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US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

reuters.com

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Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#271

Post by elicksaur »

onemoresoop wrote: post #206
radlad wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

From that ruling to this case it extends that the local or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright holder which makes little sense.

If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera?

(No)

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#272

Post by davely »

Aloisius wrote: post #247
onemoresoop wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that ruling to this case it extends that the local or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright holder which makes little sense.

It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.

To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.

I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc

[1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#273

Post by SJC_Hacker »

tantalor wrote: post #92
mikehearn wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe the guy went to Indonesia, went into the monkeys' habitat, gained their trust, set up the camera on a tripod in a way the monkeys would have access to it, adjusted the focus/exposure to capture a facial close-up -- basically engineered the entire situation specifically for that outcome, and simply because he didn't physically hit the shutter he lost credit for the photo. Meanwhile I can open my…

It's not difficult to understand. Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright. The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no…

Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the copyright for all the footage they took for studios.

Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#274

Post by Aerroon »

connicpu wrote: post #69
bilbo0s wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure this wouldn't pass the merit part unless the prompt was unusually long and precise. the human still made the prompt What I can guarantee, is that series of prompts itself would be copyright-able. (The series of prompts that ultimately created the image.) No matter how little they may weigh any one of those prompts in isolation. That is, assuming the EULA of the LLM doesn't require you to essentially place…

Unless you can make your prompt so specific that the AI generates substantially the same image every time you run it, I think you're perpetually vulnerable to the argument that significant decision making was done without human hands and therefore the work is not primarily human created.

As kids we did an art project where you mixed colors with some yoghurt-like substance. You drop it on the paper and then fold it. This created these beautiful arrangements of colors.

Does this mean that those works are not copyrighted either since the kids didn't actually direct where each color goes? Every time you do this you'd get a substantially different picture too.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#275

Post by elicksaur »

dragonwriter wrote: post #119
quadragenarian wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image? What if its a group of 5 humans that built the LLM and one of them prompts it? Isn't all AI built by some of group of humans? When is AI treated like its own entity like a monkey versus a tool made by…

> Wait just so i understand it, if a single human creates an AI model and trains it, and then prompts it to create an image, is that considered "human intervention" and does that make that human the author of that image? No, you misunderstand. The human involved is explicitly claiming the work was entirely AI authored , and that it should be given a copyright registration with the AI as the author. The human is not c…

Exactly.

We really need a human-human dispute where human A used AI to make a work and claims copyright and human B disputes the copyright. That’s the kind of case that would get into the standards for necessary human input.

Not sure if anything like that’s been filed yet.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#276

Post by [deleted] »

soulofmischief wrote: post #237
wildzzz wrote: post #21

This is pretty much the exact same case as the monkey that took a photo. The photo is now in the public domain as the monkey cannot be an author of the photo and since the photographer didn't take the photo, neither is he the author. The US Copyright Office clarified that "only works created by a human can be copyrighted under United States law, which excludes photographs and artwork created by animals or by machines…

If I tell my assistant to snap a photo, it's still credited to me, not them, though I might also credit them. If I tell my assistant, who happens to be a monkey, to snap a photo, it's credited to... the public? This is such a clear example of why US copyright law is incoherent, outdated, close-minded and desperately in need of reform. Just because something has been ruled on doesn't mean it's correct or ethically sat…

[deleted]

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#277

Post by andrewxdiamond »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #273
tantalor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not difficult to understand. Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright. The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no…

Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the copyright for all the footage they took for studios. Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...

Well no, because they are employees / contractors of the film studio, who presumably claim all copyright of what they captured.

However, the camera operators likely do own the pictures they take with their own cameras on-set, provided the contract they are working under allows for such ownership

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#278

Post by frankus »

SJC_Hacker wrote: post #273
tantalor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not difficult to understand. Replace the monkey with a 2nd human, and it's obvious that "the guy" does not earn the copyright, it goes to the person who took the photo. If there was no person, then there is no copyright. The AI thing is no different. If I ask my human friend, "please paint a picture using your vast knowledge and experience", then my friend gets the copyright. Replace friend with AI; there is no…

Ah, I see, so all those Hollywood camera operators own the copyright for all the footage they took for studios. Multi-trillion dollar class action lawsuit here we come...

In that case there's going to be a pre-existing work-for-hire agreement where the camera operator assigns copyright to the studio.

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#279

Post by oniony »

davely wrote: post #262
radlad wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas. - All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable? - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no long…

Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable work?

Re: US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

#280

Post by Aerroon »

api wrote: post #268

Ultimately I think AI models and their outputs should not be copyrightable unless they were only trained on data for which the trainer had appropriate rights (or was public domain) including the right to resell model results. These things are basically like JPEGs for knowledge and text. If I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from it. Of course since the trained model is a cumulative set of all inputs the…

>If I make a JPEG of a work I do not strip copyright from it.

Because anyone could point point out that your jpeg contains a copy of the work. It's a lot harder to point out a copy of any work in an AI model. They're trained on so many images that you can't even represent one pixel worth of data per image.

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