Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US appeals court rules AI generated art cannot be copyrighted

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 562 posts

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

#301

Post by protocolture »

jarsin wrote: post #104

This is old news. The copyright office already ruled that AI generative outputs are not copyrightable in January [1]. I think many have not understood the implications of the CO ruling. This means anything you build with llms you don't own. Your company doesn't own. If your using copilot and you have a copyright notice at the top of your source file if that ever goes to court you will learn that copyright is not vali…

It doesnt say that, it says that anything thats solely produced by simply prompting is not owned. I have seen very few works that want copyright and are solely prompts.

From your own link:

"“To be sure,” the Court further explained, “the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice."

"The Office agrees that there is an important distinction between using AI as a tool to assist in the creation of works and using AI as a stand-in for human creativity. "

"The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. "

Where the US ruling differs from others:

"Repeatedly revising prompts does not change this analysis or provide a sufficient basis for claiming copyright in the output."

Where China has had 2 cases where it supported multiple prompt changes + watermark

Also they dont rule out a change:

"There may come a time when prompts can sufficiently control expressive elements in AI-generated outputs to reflect human authorship. If further advances in technology provide users with increased control over those expressive elements, a different conclusion may be called for"

^ I would (and have) suggested that the above would likely cover the masking tools available in most image generators.

Its certainly not a case that "AI generative outputs are not copyrightable".

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

#302

Post by shagie »

deadbabe wrote: post #166

Can someone just tell me: if I make an AI photo then do some tweaks in photoshop do I now have a copyright claim since I worked on this photo and it had no author? If I use the AI photo as a reference to make a painting by hand it’s also my copyright since the original photo isn’t owned?

(1) ask a lawyer if your tweaks were sufficiently creative to justify a copyright.

(2) the work produced by the AI photo generator may itself be sufficiently derivative of other works that your work is also derivative and the original author may have a copyright claim against you since only they can authorize the distribution of derivative works.

(3) If you use the AI photo as a reference for a painting, this again falls into the "it may be derivative of another work."

For example, if I asked "Create a realistic black and white photograph of a moon rising over Half Dome in Yosemite." and it generated an image that was derivate of https://articles.anseladams.com/story-of-moon-and-half-dome/ and then you used that image as a reference for your own, your image may be considered derivative of the Ansel Adams image.

Just because the AI can't claim copyright on an image doesn't mean that the image it generated is not derivative of another that you would potentially be infringing on.

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

#303

Post by thescriptkiddie »

mikehearn wrote: post #43
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…

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…

i'm filing this one under "intellectual property is dumb and bad" and leaning my entire body weight on the door of the filing cabinet to try and get it to close

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

#304

Post by therealpygon »

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…

In short, in situation 1 there is no issue. In situation 2, if the original image can be copyrighted, AI tooling to augment the image doesn’t prevent copyright. The copyright offices guidance on the subject is a worthwhile read, since they detail out the difference between using AI as a tool to modify human authorship, vs the AI taking minimal input alone and generating a resulting image.

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

#306

Post by itronitron »

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…

What happens if you ask "the guy" to paint a picture of mickey mouse?

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

#307

Post by jarsin »

protocolture wrote: post #301
jarsin wrote: post #104

This is old news. The copyright office already ruled that AI generative outputs are not copyrightable in January [1]. I think many have not understood the implications of the CO ruling. This means anything you build with llms you don't own. Your company doesn't own. If your using copilot and you have a copyright notice at the top of your source file if that ever goes to court you will learn that copyright is not vali…

It doesnt say that, it says that anything thats solely produced by simply prompting is not owned. I have seen very few works that want copyright and are solely prompts. From your own link: "“To be sure,” the Court further explained, “the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice." "The Office agrees that there is an important distinction between using AI as a tool to assist in…

You left out the big "but". But if ai gets more optimized and automated our current conclusion will be more bolstered.

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

#308

Post by tonyhart7 »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #251
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…

> if a single human creates an AI model and trains it ... on only their own artwork?

Yeah, but this is legal loophole start

how can you prove that this is my artwork not yours???

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

#309

Post by CMay »

Unless every aspect of AI generated art is required to be marked or labeled as such in some way, it will likely still gain the benefits of copyright assumptions in the sense that if you mix copyrightable and uncopyrightable material together you will surely deter people at least within your own country or on a platform that respects copyright from using it due to the ambiguity.

Another situation is simply making "significant" manual copyrightable manipulations to your AI generated work to make it copyrighted.

Outside of situations where the author doesn't really care whether the work is copyrighted (blog images, twitter memes), it may just slow down the process rather than stopping it.

I'm more concerned about the ingestion side of things. I can't deny that the technology is awesome and generally transformative, but it's hard to deny that it intuitively feels wrong to just process all of an artist's work into a database of numbers and use it however you want.

If artists gain widespread benefit from it too, maybe it's not as bad, but that doesn't help those who opt to not use it.

At the same time, how does this impact those who create AI generated art using models created from artists who signed off on it? Does this mean there's no room for a business to create copyrightable AI generated art and thus funnel money back to the artists the model was populated from? Couldn't that hurt artists even more if the avenues of profiting from the AI shift are cut off, or is the main benefit of that to avoid copyright claims on art that turns out too similar to an existing work you didn't have a license for?

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

#310

Post by bee_rider »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #223
bee_rider wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline on Reuters seems to be more accurate (maybe it was changed after the article was posted here?). Unfortunately I can only got a glimpse of it before their overly-aggressive ad-blocker-blocker asserts itself (I’m fine with Reuters not wanting to serve me, since I block their ads, but their anti-adblocker system totally hijacks mobile safari).

You can click on "continue without supporting us".

I don’t see that option.
Post reply on HN