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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

#381

Post by eloisius »

Maken wrote: post #283
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…

- 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…

To some degree it wouldn’t be hard to do non-destructive editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal for digital cameras when shooting RAW.

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

#384

Post by chii »

radlad wrote: post #112
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…

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...

> Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location?

because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you. The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.

Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.

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

#385

Post by dusted »

This is excellent news. I'm kind of surprised. I suppose it could also mean that anything else AI generated can't be copyrighted ? So corps generating code and content with AI hopefully can't copyright that? (of course they can, but just imagine the hilarity and panic that'd ensue!)

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

#386

Post by eastbound »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #242
visarga wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the best idea would be just to scrap copyright alltogether. It just blocks people from collaborating and building on top of each other's work. If everyone demanded royalties, where would Linux be? Wikipedia? scientific research? Could we even have this conversation in a forum?

Not really a fan of destroying a framework just because some rich people finally find it inconvenient. You know it won't be retroactive anyway.

Copyright only exists to protect the rich. The lowlys don’t make patents, they don’t make money from their songs they put on Spotify, and they have to pay to watch movies.

There is a pile of economics literature dedicated to what would happen if copyright didn’t exist (anarcho-something-capitalism, if I remember).

For starters, industrial nations all raised when copyright wasn’t a thing, including China in 1980-2020.

You build wonders when you don’t need to track who owns every imaginary concept, idea, song that you can sing, bytes that are so easily copied from one disk to another, and in hindsight, our descendants might think it was totally strange that we used so much state resources, jurors, policemen, heaps of lawyers, to give a task to the state related to preventing people from reusing each other’s imaginary concepts.

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

#387

Post by sejje »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #327
elicksaur wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What if I ask a stranger to take my photo, and it turns out he's Ansel Adams?

He's going to make some decisions about the framing etc, as one of the best photographers of all time.

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

#389

Post by sejje »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #329
dylan604 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, you use a remote shutter release or a timer, and remove all ambiguity by removing the friend. there's a scene in one of those Matthew McConaughey romcoms where he plays a photog. The crew has a scene completely setup up and ready to go so that he just walks in, hits the shutter release one time, and then walks away with little care as job is done. He's now credited for that photo, yet did the least effort possi…

Then a machine took the photo and it can't be copyrighted, apparently. These rules are totally arbitrary.

The machine took the photo either way, in fact. Whether you press the instant shutter button, or delayed one. And the film is what responds to the scene.

It seems almost directly analogous to asking the AI for an image that you imagine.

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