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.
"Minimal input" like pushing a button on a camera? Seems to me that is more minimal than some of the elaborate prompting it takes to get AI to output a desired image.
I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected then the image would be too?
I think this ruling is wrong. It's not hard to imagine a compiler using AI to optimize byte code, and so now the binary it creates is no longer copyrightable? Compilers and transpilers, even though someone else may have wrote them, the courts have held the the copyright of the output binary is whoever wrote the source code. In that sense AI is nothing more than a English language to image compiler.
Compiled byte code is a derivative work of the original source code. Copyright extends to derivative works.
But if I copyright the prompt to the input of the AI, does that not also become a derivative work?
I do believe in the US (I could be wrong) that copyright does exist without registering it with the US government.
I agree, to an extent. I mentioned it in another comment but IMO there's a big difference between someone who types a low-effort prompt like "silly image of a cat" and someone who spends hours or days iterating on a prompt. Or someone who uses AI to iteratively tweak an image (which may or may not have initially been AI-generated.) Or someone who creates art out of smaller components created by AI (e.g. textures.)
No there isn't (a big difference) Like, really. If I open ms paint and just do some low effort scrawl, I have copyright on that. Level of effort has not ever decided if something is copyrightable or not. For derivative works, there is real effort required to de distinct from the original. Maybe that's a more interesting discussion... Is low effort use of an AI insufficient to prevent the copyright from reverting to t…
On top of that "level of effort" is obviously very subjective.
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…
- 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? On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief) direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone and it's impos…
There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing forward.
It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon photos.
If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera? (No)
"you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.
Do “you choose” to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees to capture a bit of the sky? Or do “you choose” the moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There is always some creative decision involved by the person who presses the shutter
"Minimal input" like pushing a button on a camera? Seems to me that is more minimal than some of the elaborate prompting it takes to get AI to output a desired image.
I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected then the image would be too?
This really opens the door for AI spam. If someone is making money selling AI spam images, you can just copy all their art and also post it. You don't even need to generate your own stuff.
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…
Why is the person who "took the photo" the thing that pressed the button and not the person who did 99% of the work?
I think my understand is that because the work itself is already covered by different laws (eg trespassing), you had the opportunity to make a verbal contract with the person who took the photo. And the same in reverse: because they used your camera, they implicitly agreed for you to have the right to that copy of their work. If they didn’t get the copyright automatically, then they wouldn’t be able to assign it to you as a condition of being present, leading to other potential legal complications where works could be created but where nobody holds the right to assign them to someone else, since nobody was 100% responsible for the creativity that generated it
I think that's a good ruling. Say I create a website that just sells AI generated logos. I set up some automation so I'm constantly generating millions of logos per day. I also have a bot that scrapes the web to try and find anyone using a logo similar to the ones on my website, and then send legal threats demanding payment for copying my artwork. I'm sure more imaginative scammers will find a way to copyright troll…
Copyright law: A reason that copyright trolls are less common than patent trolls is that under copyright law, works created independently are not infringing. In court, you might have to prove that you did actually create the thing independently, but I think most juries would be sympathetic to this case. "Oh, you think that the defendant combed through your giant library of millions of logos to find this one specific,…
It's amazing when laws make complete and consistent sense, +100 to this great answer