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Copyright Registration Guidance: Works containing material generated by AI

federalregister.gov

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

#301

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

famouswaffles wrote: post #46
EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> 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…

Don't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts can be overruled by congress. 100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.

“The courts can be overruled by congress” is, to put it mildly, not correct.

Congress can pass legislation that changes the legal status of things (as long as it doesn’t run afoul of the constitution). But that’s a far cry from “overruling”.

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

#302

Post by 6nf »

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #3

> 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…

Ok but how will they know?

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

#303

Post by auggierose »

That's not going to be practical. How do you distinguish if something was created by mere computation, or by AI? Oops, AI is just mere computation. So if you forbid mere computation, I cannot use fancy numerical algorithms in shading my 3D art? Ain't gonna fly.

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

#304

Post by auggierose »

iainctduncan wrote: post #201
Bjartr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.

I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories…

Putting it on a website is enough.

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

#305

Post by hnbad »

brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

That sounds like your prompt is protected by copyright. I don't see why the output of a machine you feed your prompt into should be.

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

#306

Post by lucubratory »

kube-system wrote: post #95
lIl-IIIl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statement addresses this: >The Office recognizes that AI-generated works implicate other copyright issues not addressed in this statement. It has launched an agency-wide initiative to delve into a wide range of these issues. Among other things, the Office intends to publish a notice of inquiry later this year seeking public input on additional legal and policy topics, including how the law should apply to the use…

I think that the answer they want to say is, “it probably does”, but they don’t want to say it and cause a big disruption to commerce until the courts intervene.

There is precedent in Authors' Guild vs Google and Perfect 10 vs Google that it doesn't, this isn't the first time things like this have come before the courts.

There are also laws to consider. I know this is US law and the US doesn't have those laws, but copyright harmonisation is a thing and the EU, UK, Japan etc all have laws very explicitly stating that TDM is an exemption to copyright - some bodies would presumably consider that.

And finally, there's national security. The US's current view is that it's in an existential great power competition with Chinese society, and needs to compete on every level to succeed. One of those levels is very explicitly AI, it's considered a main "battlefront" in the new Cold War. If the US significantly restricts TDM, that not only makes it less competitive compared to jurisdictions that don't like the UK, EU, Japan, and China, but it specifically improves the effectiveness of the Thousand Talents program which the US IC and analyst community view as a very serious threat. Academics want to be able to do their research, AI is critically important to US national security, and currently the US is statistically the best place to be an AI researcher. The government won't want to jeopardize that when China is already advancing in AI very rapidly and actively trying to tempt scientists to come over with better pay and conditions.

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

#307

Post by hnbad »

dragonwriter wrote: post #210
brotchie wrote: post #45

I’m curious. If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? Certainly a lot of artistic vision and effort to get to the finished “work”.

> If I’ve spent 8 hours getting the perfect prompt, fine tuning a few LORAs, mixing them, choosing between 8 different checkpointed stable diffusion models, and have done a bunch of in painting, does this constitute a copyrightable work? The 8 hours doesn’t matter. By the USCO’s ruling, iterative prompt refinement probably wouldn’t, but that’s not super clear (partially, because the USCO’s description of what the mod…

IANAL but I'd assume "inpainting" is legally considered equivalent to arranging. You're not pushing pixels in Photoshop, you're just running the AI again on a particular part of the output, thus combining that output with previous output. This seems equivalent to bricolage at best.

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

#308

Post by eternalban »

dotancohen wrote: post #256
BarryMilo wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few weeks. I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.

As a (once avid) reader, the worrying part will be discovery. Why I was eight I could pick any book off the library shelf and it was interesting and enlightening. Today, the noise so outdrowns the signal that I have to rely on recommendations. Tomorrow, when both the books and the recommendations will be generated by bots outpacing human authors by orders of magnitude, I expect that quality new material will be impos…

(Closed) Knowledge communities* -- will resurrect and undoubtedly there will be communities with a spiritual basis. Possibly a new age of Modern Midevalism awaits.

* think monks and manuscripts

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

#309

Post by datpiff »

Kerrick wrote: post #176
marcus_holmes wrote: post #52

Yay, the software development industry is saved! (only partly /s) Not that I thought AI would be writing decent code for a while yet, but the fact that AI-generated code can't be copyrighted (and therefore licensed[0]) is going to create problems. It'll be interesting where they draw the line with this, though: If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be o…

> If the AI generates all the code, but then a human debugs it and alters it, is that copyright that can be owned? Does the entire code base then become copyrightable? I am not a lawyer and I did not research anything for this, but I'm under the impression that a derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable. If something isn't copyrightable, it's in the public domain. So, if you alter it…

> derivative work of something in the public domain is itself copyrightable

I don't think this is true in most of the world.

Here's a UK referience: https://copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p22_derivative_work...

"You cannot extend the duration of copyright in a work by creating a derivative work. If the original work is in the public domain, it will remain in the public domain; you cannot prevent anyone else using the same public domain work for their own purposes."

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

#310

Post by prepend »

calgarymicro wrote: post #194
bcrosby95 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reid Hoffman just published a book written with gpt4 [0] so it’s not even a hypothetical.

He made it available as a free ebook but it’s also for sale on Amazon.

I wonder if people remove his portions and just retain the ai portion if they can distribute it freely.

[0] https://greylock.com/greymatter/amplifying-humanity-through-...

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