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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

#381

Post by greysphere »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #380
greysphere wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I trash your house that's cool? You still have your house, it's just in a different entropy state. Or maybe one particular state had more value than another? So maybe when other people value different entropic states over others, perhaps that has value?

> Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

I'm interpreting your view as property only applies to physical things or abstractions of physical things. Is there a name for this theory? I'd say I subscribe to the labor theory or property and it's interesting to think about this from another perspective.

There's a couple cases I'm having trouble with. For example, is an ip address property? Seems so because it represents a physical scheme about the routing of ip packets. Similarly an email address or physical address seems like property. If any of these were replicated/spoofed by someone else, they would disrupt the ability to physically route whatever (bits, packages). Ok.

But then what about trademarks? In some ways those are 'pull' addresses - I go to the store, and buy a Coke and I'm expecting that thing labeled Coke to be the physical product I expect, not some spoofed version of Coke. But that label and what not is just a picture, and the original picture wasn't harmed in any way when the spoofed version was created. Is this concept just not allowed and we accept that inefficiency? Or maybe trademarks are allowed as property because they represent the physical concept of the systems the Coke corporation has put in place to create and produce Coke.

But if that's the case, then what about a non-trademark painting? If I go to the store and see a painting by an artist I like, and want to support them and the physical systems the went into generating that painting, and not be spoofed should that be supported?

(Though maybe all this could be solved with a QR code or DOP label or something. Though somewhat inconvenient to have to robustly check that all the time).

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

#382

Post by pksebben »

VLM wrote: post #369
gambiting wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly think this is a fools game - maybe it will work in those very very early stages of generative AI we're in now, but there's no way this can work reliably going forward. If anything, I imagine it will soon start yielding false positives against human generated work too.

Probably not. This is gross simplification of how counterfeit photocopied money is detected, but human visual acuity for yellow dots on white paper is pretty weak compared to red dots, so color photocopiers and color printers have/had firmware that would seed money with extraneous yellow dots. Computer vision has no such visual distortion and as such computers see counterfeit money as covered in yellow dots. In a way…

right, but what do you do once I've taken my AI generated image, run it through illustrator's image trace, and performed just enough automated manipulation, then copied it through a format or two?

Writing a method to scrub this stuff is trivial.

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

#383

Post by andreareina »

datpiff wrote: post #309
Kerrick wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

The derivative is subject to copyright, the original isn't. If I make a new translation of The Count of Monte Cristo I own the copyright to the translation but not to the original story etc.

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

#384

Post by andreareina »

weavejester wrote: post #79
kube-system wrote: post #8

This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter. But it doesn’t answer any tough questions either, like: if an AI model outputs something very close to a training input, does the result infringe on the copyrights of the input work?

> This is all very sane and consistent with previous opinions on the matter. Is that sarcasm?

Adding context: this decision for example follows naturally from the monkey selfie case.

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

#385

Post by exodust »

antibasilisk wrote: post #357
exodust wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty much any image that can be imagined is now trivial to produce What? That's not true at all! If you're talking about "art", most artists are fussy and want things exactly right. They will spend a long time tweaking the image, or combining different images, painting, processing, pixel-pushing to get the thing they imagined. If you're talking about some random need for an image of a "horse with metal legs", and…

There is plenty of ability to tweak AI images, I don't understand this objection.

You claim "all digital art is worthless because it can all be tweaked into existence in under a minute".

If that were true, I could show you any piece of digital art, be it 2D or 3D rendered, and you should have no trouble making an identical copy in under a minute using only diffusion models and tweaking! That is an impossible task, I promise.

I'm enjoying stable diffusion as a fun playground and rendering engine. But it can't magically produce the exact picture in my mind.

Even simple things like "hero tree in dark misty forest, old swing hanging from large twisted branch, path extending into gloom". The AI will produce a nice image, but not the one in my mind. The image in my mind is important for style or composition reasons relative to the whole work. Artists rarely think in terms of isolated one-hit-wonders, they are producing work with important and meaningful connected threads and detailed elements.

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

#386

Post by greysphere »

alphanullmeric wrote: post #380
greysphere wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I trash your house that's cool? You still have your house, it's just in a different entropy state. Or maybe one particular state had more value than another? So maybe when other people value different entropic states over others, perhaps that has value?

> Am I physically touching your painting when I copy it? If not, then your attempt at equating physical property to thoughts is nonsense. We both believe in physical property, however arbitrarily invented it is. Only you believe in intellectual property, and I’m willing to bet you aren’t even consistent with it. Should you be fined for saving an NFT?

Honestly, it seems like if you accept any contract law you implicitly must accept copyright law. Consider the following contracts:

I agree to harvest your crops in exchange for 50% of the yield.

I agree to sing if you give me supper.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and not record me.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law.

I agree to sing if you give me supper and subscribe to all the rules of copyright law and all people in your jurisdiction also subscribe to copyright law. (And then some folks who wanted a singer got together and passed a law that satisfied the singer's requirements).

All these seem reasonable to extensions of the previous and it seems like we've ended up at the latter.

You might say 'well I didn't agree to that contract', but there are plenty of things in the world that we are bound by that individuals that we didn't explicitly agree to. I didn't explicitly agree to not dump motor oil in the ocean, or hunt deer on a certain day or that 50 decibels as the bound for noise during the night, or that children of age 12 can't vote, or that I have to wear pants in public.

You might argue that the last step is invalid, and instead the world should be a place where individuals can pick and choose which laws they are interested in subscribing too. I don't really want to put much effort into that path because my intuition is that's equivalent to anarchy, but maybe there's an alternate argument here.

So it seems to have a world w/o copyright law, you have to throw out contract law, or convince everyone to stop somewhere on that chain, perhaps not to make the contracts that mimic copyright law, or make a law making such contracts invalid. The later two options seem fairly artificial, impinging on folks self determination. So we're left with having to eliminate contract law, which seems pretty limiting.

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

#387

Post by smeagull »

kccqzy wrote: post #154
smeagull wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, someone needs to notify photographers about this immediately. No more copyright for them.

Did you read the linked article? > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constituti…

> “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author.”

Yeah, much like a person using an AI.

Do you understand the debate happening here at all?

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

#388

Post by smeagull »

s1mon wrote: post #155
smeagull wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, someone needs to notify photographers about this immediately. No more copyright for them.

The notice explicitly covers photography. > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making > unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright > protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a > photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead > created by a camera. > The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no do…

Much like the writer of a prompt. The notice is stupid.

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

#389

Post by pbhjpbhj »

avereveard wrote: post #231
RHSeeger wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious where the "line" is, though. If I do a web search for a term, I get various results. As I refine my search, the results get closer to what I want. Eventually, there comes a point where it's possible to recognize that there is "skill" associated with crafting a good web search. To some extent, the same is true of crafting what you tell the AI to generate for you; especially as AIs become more complex in wh…

Never for the generated work, because a human isn't doing it, but you may be able to copyright the prompt

The prompt isn't a creative work, it's constrained by a technical need (producing a desired response from a generative computer system).v

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

#390

Post by maeil »

PeterisP wrote: post #339
recuter wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs, a cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely original to me. - Did you use an AI to produce it? - See, the problem with fine art is that it's supposed to express original truths. But who likes originality and truth?! Nobody! Lifes hard enough without it! Only an idiot would pay for it! Popular art knows the customer is always right! People want more…

> - Your honor my wholly original work of Halvin and Cobbs, a cartoon of a little boy and his pet tiger is entirely original to me. And as you submit this to the court, the other party requests discovery of evidence from your computer, your communications and (based on that) the API logs of a particular third party provider you could have used, and uses that to not only dismiss your court claim but forward it to the…

Soon inference for big LLMs will be ran locally, without leaving any kind of logs which can't trivially be erased.
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