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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

#421

Post by verisimi »

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…

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder?

Yes, it is. Computers are people too. Mind you, if the server is rebooted facilitating resurrection in the ai, the penalty ought to be deferred. /s

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

#422

Post by jonathanstrange »

spyder wrote: post #313
jonathanstrange wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright covers the prompt, it's not even clear why it should be relevant for the output of the AI software based on that prompt.

That's like saying copyright covers the mouse clicks and mouse movements in Photoshop but not the output pixels.

You might find that strange and disagree with it with a flawed analogy but I've merely reported the official stance of the US Copyright Office and legal precedents. See, for instance, this overview with further references:

https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2025/02/us-co...

"Prompts Are Generally Insufficient to Make AI Output Copyrightable"

If you don't trust this summary, read the US Copyright Office report for yourself. The gist of the position is that prompts are not specific enough and do not lead to deterministic output.

On a side note, I find it weird that even on HN people automatically assume you're only expressing a personal opinion, yet in all fairness I should have included some references from the start.

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

#423

Post by pndy »

mikehearn wrote: post #43
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…

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…

> Meanwhile I can open my phone's camera, spin around three times, take a photo of whatever the hell happens to be in its viewfinder and somehow that is sufficient human creativity to deserve copyright protection.

Your comment made me wonder if this rule can open a door to a new legal precedent in which you aren't the owner of photos taken with your smartphone because camera app utilizes AI to "enhance" whatever you had in frame and you can't disable it, exluding your from legal ownership. And copyright to these photos is ceeded to corporation whose device you purchased, and/or one which provided the alrogithms

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

#424

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

davely wrote: post #262
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...

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…

There's a startup doing something close to this. I can't remember the name and I'm not going to look it up, but the pitch is that you feed it a copyright stock image and it uses AI to create a usable-but-clearly-different near equivalent - a situation where absence of copyright is a feature, not a bug.

Technically it's a derivative work. Practically you'd never tell, and proof of derivation is impossible.

The law as it currently stands is completely unable to deal with these issues.

It's not even clear what the issues are, because copyright is primarily about protecting income rights from significant original invention. The mechanical act of making a copy is somewhat incidental.

When invention is mechanised (or if you want to be less charitable, replaced by algorithmic grey goo) the definition of "significant original invention" either needs to be tightened up or replaced.

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

#425

Post by chii »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #400
chii wrote: post #384

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? 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 No, this can't happen, because there is no consideration. > and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you Nope. You can call it consideration, but that won't make it consideration.

consideration doesnt have to be money.

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

#426

Post by IlikeKitties »

mikehearn wrote: post #43
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…

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…

Copyright is actually really easy to understand:

> Does the Situation Benefit Large Corporations holding the copyright?

Falls 100% into the category of protected by copyright

> Does the Situation Benefit small Artists or the individual consumer?

Copyright does not apply, how dare you?

Always has been this way, always will be. And that's why you should teach your children how to pirate media, circumvent DRM and use FOSS whenever possible.

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

#427

Post by Sharlin »

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…

Yes it is in fact difficult and nuanced. The act of pressing the shutter button does not create copyright. The creative work done to make the photograph possible does.

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

#428

Post by CBarkleyU »

Karliss wrote: post #407
pas wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you happen to have more reading material on said law?

In Germany, you can't even transfer copyright. So yeah, anything you create that reaches the threshold of having a copyright, you own the copyright. Even as an employee.

At the same time, you might not own the usage rights (Nutzungsrechte/Verwertungsrechte).

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

#429

Post by AlienRobot »

Kerrick wrote: post #367
dlivingston wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's more like a set of numbers since the prompt is just an interface that gets tokenized.

It would be like saying a DJ's equalizer settings are copyrightable.

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

#430

Post by einr »

fnordian_slip wrote: post #393
mminer237 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their interaction being they are in no way copyrightable because they are functional, not creative expressions. That's part of why every recipe has a dramatic story, so they can have a clear copyright case if copied wholesale.

Is that really the reason for these stories? I only know about them from memes, and looked it up when I first read about it. In my language this trend hasn't caught on yet, thankfully. I always chalked it up to cultural differences (and judged Americans a little bit for it tbh, since the idea of integrating a story into a recipe sounds rather insane).

It is (or used to be) for SEO. Google Search loves walls of "relevant" text and will punish recipe sites that get right to the point.
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