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

401–410 of 562 posts

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

#401

Post by Karliss »

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…

That doesn't seem right. While I agree that not being able to copyright AI generated commercial code is problematic and reason for avoiding it, the need to transfer all rights to customer doesn't seem like one of them.

Following your logic you couldn't use any third party library open source or not since you don't own copyrights to them either. Can't even use an existing compiler since parts of standard library will be embedded in it's output.

I assume what's actually intended in such cases is transferring all the rights necessary so that customer can afterwards do whatever they want with software without your permission, including making modifications, hiring someone else to further maintain it or even reselling it. It can still be a valid requirement not to depend on any commercial libraries which require temporary licensing or otherwise restrict customers ability to do what they want with combined software. Same applies for open source libraries with restrictive license (especially stuff like GPL).

When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you and you custom have full rights to copy and distribute those parts of software as do everyone else, you just don't own exclusive rights (copyrights) to control whether and how anyone else can also copy those parts of software. Do you own copyright for number "10", does it mean you can't use it in your software.

The potentially problematic part is when you are trying to sell a commercial product and someone "pirates" it. If it's not copyrightable there is no piracy. In practice even largely AI generated software will contain some copyrightable parts, but the enforcement will probably still get a lot messier and no legal team wants that. In theory some could only copy the non-copyrightable parts and substitute the parts which weren't AI generated.

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

#402

Post by dragonwriter »

chii wrote: post #384
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...

> 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 int…

> because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you.

That's not how contract law works.

> The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you.

Even if there was an otherwise valid contract, with this as an implicit term, you can't transfer copyright ownership from the actual author by implicit agreement: "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent." (17 USC Sec. 204)

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

#403

Post by bluecalm »

Isn't AI just a tool here like any other? Sounds very inconsistent to me. It would be better to narrow copyright protection but grant it more liberally imo.

Non tech people deciding on tech cases. In the next episode we will get AI paintbrush smart enough to help you but dumb enough the court still let's you copyright your work. Top legal minds deciding if it's sufficiently dumb to meet arbitrary standard they came up with when deciding the previous case.

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

#404

Post by dragonwriter »

bluecalm wrote: post #403

Isn't AI just a tool here like any other? Sounds very inconsistent to me. It would be better to narrow copyright protection but grant it more liberally imo. Non tech people deciding on tech cases. In the next episode we will get AI paintbrush smart enough to help you but dumb enough the court still let's you copyright your work. Top legal minds deciding if it's sufficiently dumb to meet arbitrary standard they came u…

> Isn't AI just a tool here like any other?

In this case, no, because the human involved explicit sought a copyright registration listing the AI as the author, and claims that the work was entirely the product of the AI.

(In point of fact, yes, the AI is a tool used by a human, and to the extent the work may be copyrightable, copyright should have been sought listing the human author; but that's not what happened, and the case deals with the legality of what was actually sought, not what arguably should instead have been sought.)

> Non tech people deciding on tech cases.

Almost as bad as non law people commenting on law cases.

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

#405

Post by concordDance »

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…

In cases like this it's best to ask why we have copyright law in the first place. Do we feel the supply of such photos is naturally lower then we'd like to such an extent that we'd grant a legally enforced monopoly on its distribution?

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

#406

Post by wruza »

randomNumber7 wrote: post #198
parsimo2010 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think in later cases we'll get some tests to apply about how much human intervention is required. Who trained the LLM is probably not the issue, the courts would likely want to know about the training material. If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright. Warhol's estate probabl…

> If I trained a model exclusively on Warhol art, and then had that model create new images in Warhol's style, I didn't do any of the creative work and probably don't get the copyright. If I watch exclusively Warhol images for years and then paint something similar I get copyright. There needs to be a gray are, because usually art is not done in a vacuum?

You also cannot train only on Warhol imagery, unless he drew billions of pics. So this is hypothetical “if”. In reality you finetune an existing network based on a dataset much larger than Warhol’s.

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

#407

Post by Karliss »

pas wrote: post #196
JamesLeonis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The artist still owns the copyright. Payment by itself does not transfer copyright. To do that the artist needs to explicitly sign away those rights. This happens in employment all the time. Part of the paperwork you sign is about transferring over the copyrights from yourself to the company. I highly recommend you check your own paperwork to see exactly how much this covers, since some states allow contracts that co…

doesn't need to explicitly, it's enough to have the understanding that it's a "work for hire" situation (at least in the US) of course just giving someone money is not sufficient to establish this, but telling someone that "I want to hire you to make a photo for me (of me)" and they acknowledge, then that is probably enough.

One more example demonstrating the opposite - in EU the copyright law explicitly states that transferable copyrights for software get automatically transferred from employees to the company. Which suggests that for other types of copyrightable works and author/customer relationships it doesn't happen automatically.

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

#408

Post by wruza »

oytis wrote: post #154
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…

> as long as it was a human that told the computer to make the image or wrote the code that allowed the computer to generate the image on its own, then the human is the author. The human would be the author of the prompt, but not the image IMO. The image was created not (only) by the author of the prompt, but also the numerous authors of the images consumed by the model and the authors of the model itself.

It was insipred by these authors, not created. I won’t claim where copyright/authorship should be, but this reduction makes less sense than needed for important definitions.

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

#409

Post by kadoban »

brewtide wrote: post #347
bmicraft wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess if the prompt is complex enough to be protected then the image would be too?

Gotta be 1,000 words.

> Gotta be 1,000 words.

What? Why? There's poems and stories shorter than that that must be copyrightable.

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

#410

Post by tpm »

Karliss wrote: post #401
tpm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn't seem right. While I agree that not being able to copyright AI generated commercial code is problematic and reason for avoiding it, the need to transfer all rights to customer doesn't seem like one of them. Following your logic you couldn't use any third party library open source or not since you don't own copyrights to them either. Can't even use an existing compiler since parts of standard library will…

> When no one owns copyrights - everyone does. Both you and you custom have full rights to copy and distribute those parts of software as do everyone else, you just don't own exclusive rights (copyrights) to control whether and how anyone else can also copy those parts of software. Do you own copyright for number "10", does it mean you can't use it in your software.

Yes. It can be an issue depending of the wording of your agreement with the customer. For example, if 'you' agreed to develop a piece of software 'exclusively' for the customer, and then use AI to create substantial parts of the software, then neither it was 'you' who developed that, nor was it 'exclusively' for the customer as you can't grant exclusivity.

Post reply on HN