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

431–440 of 562 posts

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

#431

Post by donatj »

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…

Who owns the copyright to the footage of a motion triggered security camera? The person breaking in?

Is all motion triggered trail cam footage public domain?

It seems pretty reasonable that copyright should lay with the entity that had the actual intention on creating a work. Not whatever force happened to trigger it.

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

#432

Post by mschuster91 »

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...

Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1].

[1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urh...

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

#433

Post by ourmandave »

ourmandave wrote: post #29
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…

Can they still try the Corporations Are People angle?

To subtle I guess. The point being, where I live, the Jan 6th Committee was anti-tourist, socialized healthcare = communism, every day mass shootings are unsolvable, shitcoins are Federal Reserve notes, and Corporations Are People.

So in that system, with enough lawyers, lobbyists, and money, it's only a matter of time before some judge rules that AI = Rembrandt.

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

#434

Post by ratedgene »

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…

This is interesting. So is anything generated by AI not copyrightable?

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

#436

Post by chimprich »

roughly wrote: post #243
autoexec wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's next? Shutting down an AI is murder? I can see a possible future where AI actually exists and shutting one down could be murder. At that point it would even be a good thing to grant the AI personhood. What passes for "AI" these days doesn't come anywhere close to that, but I wouldn't say it could never happen.

About 95% of the conversation about “AI” has this problem right now: there are some interesting theoretical legal and social implications from AI, but what we have right now are LLMs, not AI. They can’t replace your workers, they can’t make art, they can’t hold copyright, not because the law doesn’t treat them as people, but because they’re a fancy autocomplete algorithm that spits out text convincing enough to spike…

> what we have right now are LLMs, not AI

LLMs are a subset of AI. The field has been called AI for over 70 years.

Let's try to at least keep the terminology correct on HN.

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

#437

Post by DougBTX »

tpm wrote: post #410
Karliss wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

On the other hand, if ‘you’ had taken no action at all, then there would be no software at all. The actions by ‘you’ are necessary for the software to exist, so the argument must be about whether those actions count as development or not. Is the definition of development written down anywhere?

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

#438

Post by SiempreViernes »

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…

You better be willing to question whether photographs can be copyrightable at all, because they are all result of several mechanical systems not created by the camera operator.

Just limiting yourself to only "digital computation" being magical enough to invalidate copyright is an arbitrary restriction. Unless you clarify why you think the computation performed by the lens system doesn't have that property, further discussion seems pointless because it will just collapse to a circular "digital computation is magical enough", which is your implied premise.

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

#439

Post by michaelbuckbee »

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 your photo of the moon after Samsung uses "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

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

#440

Post by swalsh »

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…

Anyone who has tried prompting AI to create an image should know it's not "trivial". It takes skill to get a good image, and the prompt itself is human creativity. The idea that the work produced is not from a human is insane. The model is just a tool like a camera.
Post reply on HN