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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

#361

Post by buzer »

tpm wrote: post #204
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there is no person to assign the copyright, so there is no copyright. Wait, so if I have a script that generates some source-code autonomously (based on whatever trigger I setup say in a ci/cd pipeline) then that code is not copyrightable? What about macros? This seems silly to me.

In Germany at least, code written by AI is not copyrightable, it's in public domain, as we were briefed by a lawyer recently. This is a huge issue if you are writing software for a customer and agree to transfer all rights to him (happens sometimes), because you don't own rights to AI-written code and so can't transfer that. There are nuances, so if you create a macro and then that macro writes something but it is co…

> In Germany at least, code written by AI is not copyrightable

> There are nuances, so if you create a macro and then that macro writes something but it is completely determined by you then it should be ok.

How far does that extend? Like would IntelliSense cause your code to not be copyrightable? It's not that different from AI autocomplete on principal level. It shows you some options, but you make the final decision what to use.

And what about binaries? These days there are not many people who could tell the exact binary that is produced by certain source code.

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

#362

Post by samlinnfer »

mistrial9 wrote: post #284
gdubs wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My initial response to this was to think of all the artists who don't actually create their own work. Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc. Even way back a lot of masters were credited for work that was done by apprentices. But, then on the other hand I suppose that in the eyes of the law, a monkey can't legally sign a contract agreeing to pass ownersh…

> Lots of contemporary artists have assistants that do the actual painting, sculpting, installation, etc. this is outlandish bullshit

All the classic masters have workshops, where they have students or assistants that complete a rough cut of their work and they finish it.

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

#363

Post by SoftTalker »

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…

My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce. Yet I'm the one writing the code.

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

#364

Post by Mistletoe »

lyu07282 wrote: post #118
Mistletoe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be a time when shutting down an AI is murder and I don’t think we are equipped for that question or answer yet.

Seems odd considering a huge chunk of sci-fi tried to raise that question for over a century.

But that’s make believe. In the real world people scoff at it like the parent comment.

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

#365

Post by lesuorac »

SilasX wrote: post #219
lesuorac wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you arrived at that conclusion. The photographer has been claiming the entire time it's his copyright while other people (namely PETA) have been arguing the monkey should have it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

You missed that the selling point of the picture is the supposed self awareness and intent involved in the monkey taking a selfie? Yes, of course the author has always wanted the copyright. But the whole reason the picture has value contradicts the basis for that copyright claim. You can’t simultaneously say that you did all the work, and that it’s so cool to see a genuine, self-directed monkey selfie.

From his blog in 2011 [1].

> I put my camera on a tripod with a very wide angle lens, settings configured such as predictive autofocus, motorwind, even a flashgun, to give me a chance of a facial close up if they were to approach again for a play. I duly moved away and bingo, they moved in, fingering the toy, pressing the buttons and fingering the lens.

> ...

> They played with the camera until of course some images were inevitably taken!

Afaik, he has never taken the position that the monkey did any more work besides just hitting the button. He just didn't contest news articles overly stating the role of the monkey. There's also a significant amount of photos taken definitely by him on the same blog post so it's not like the purpose of the blog post is the monkey photo.

[1]: http://www.djsphotography.co.uk/Tropical%20Forests/Sulawesi%...

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

#366

Post by bredren »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #326
davely wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> - 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 longer copyrightable? The number 5 is not copyrightable, but if I take your short story and replace every space with the number 5 it's still subject to the original copyright.

This is already essentially in iOS. In Photos edit mode, there is a Clean Up tool.

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

#367

Post by Kerrick »

dlivingston wrote: post #360
ssalka wrote: post #49

I think the headline is overly broad, especially considering: > As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr. Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s appli…

Just zooming in on txt2img, an AI generated image is: - The text prompt - The negative prompt - The model - The model seed - Any LoRAs selected What about this is copyrightable? The specific text used in the prompt? This would mean I could copyright "man holding apple". Maybe the summation of all of the above? But that would be akin to copyrighting a specific Adobe Photoshop workflow.

That sounds to me like a recipe. Recipes their interaction with copyright are well-established, legally speaking, in the United States.

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

#368

Post by bredren »

nightski wrote: post #332
therealpygon wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It goes away beyond this. You can create your own custom Lora. The tags that go into that, combined with prompting is sophisticated authorship.

It can be reasonably be considered technical than handling a professional camera.

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

#369

Post by jjmarr »

ssalka wrote: post #49

I think the headline is overly broad, especially considering: > As a matter of statutory law, the Copyright Act requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being. Dr. Thaler’s copyright registration application listed the Creativity Machine as the work’s sole author, even though the Creativity Machine is not a human being. As a result, the Copyright Office appropriately denied Dr. Thaler’s appli…

Personally I'd like to see whether img2img works are copyrightable. My understanding is that copyright applies to the human-generated parts of an image. So e.g. In the case of a comic where the art is AI but the caption is human, the label but not the art is copyrightable.

How does that apply when we transform a copyrighted image? Is the resulting work covered by the copyright of the original? If so, can I create a bad sketch drawing, transform it with img2img, and get the result as copyrighted? If not, is there a specific denoising threshold at which copyright isn't applied?

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

#370

Post by andirk »

SoftTalker wrote: post #363
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…

My employer asserts copyright over everything I produce. Yet I'm the one writing the code.

Yup. Because we agreed to that up front to "transfer ownership" or some jargon. Otherwise yes it is yours.
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