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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

#461

Post by freejazz »

SiempreViernes wrote: post #438
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…

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 di…

Why would anyone need to question whether photographs can be copyrighted at all? It's been settled jurisprudence for quite a long time.

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

#462

Post by kdamica »

einr wrote: post #430
fnordian_slip wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s also to add vertical height so you see more ads on your way to the recipe.

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

#463

Post by stonemetal12 »

davely wrote: post #272
Aloisius wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.

To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc [1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about

>To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression.

Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you own the copyright on the prompt.

Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if you invited ten painters over to your house and read the prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably produce the same picture suggests that you are not in control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have no claim to the copyright.

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

#464

Post by droideqa »

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…

Could a corporation be the author of a picture? Corporations have all the rights of people in the USA, right?

I always wondered why we don’t just let AIs run corporations and therefore give them personhood rights.

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

#465

Post by gmueckl »

dlivingston wrote: post #360
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…

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.

The prompt is a literary work independent of the system processing it. If the text is sufficiently elaborate, it is certainly copyright able. But the resulting image is still a different affair.

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

#466

Post by visarga »

rlpb wrote: post #171
visarga wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't copyright something that your AI generated Seems like a loophole, if I generate synthetic data with a model trained on copyrighted works, the synthetic data is copyright free? So I can later train models on it?

You can't "launder" copyright away like that. The court will see straight through it. See "What color are your bits?" at https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

There are over 200K language modeling datasets on Hugging Face, I bet a large portion of them were generated with LLMs, and all LLMs to date have been trained on copyrighted data. So they are all tainted.

But philosophically, I wonder if it's allright to block that, it techincally follows the definition of copyright. It does not carry the expression, but borrows abstractions and facts. That's exactly what is allowed.

If we move to block synthetic data, then anyone can be accused of infringement when they reuse abstractions learned somewhere else. Creativity would not be possible.

On the other hand models trained on synthetic data will never regurgitate the originals because they never saw them.

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

#467

Post by tantalor »

ehnto wrote: post #357
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…

It's clear "the guy" did the majority of the creative work, so whilst it's "not difficult to understand" the law, it is a nuanced situation. Pretending it is not because of the letter of the law is just sidestepping the conversation we are trying to have.

This is a very good point.

For example, consider a photograph of a painting. The photographer owns the copyright to the photo, but the artist retains copyright over the painting contained within the photo, which is derivative of the original artwork.

It is less obvious that simply setting up a scene and camera where anybody (including a monkey) can use it meets that threshold for an original work. After all, the scene was outdoors and completely natural.

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

#469

Post by [deleted] »

soerxpso wrote: post #246
slavik81 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the AI is considered a person. It's that your inputs were the same in both cases, and it's your creative input that justifies the copyright. If your creative input was insufficient to justify granting you copyrights in one case, they would also be insufficient in the other case, as the inputs were identical in both cases.

In the case mentioned above where someone just spins around in their chair and takes a random photo on their phone (which they would then own the rights to), did that person really do any 'creative input'? All they did was press a button on a tool, with no further thought. That actually seems like less creative input than when I type a prompt into a tool and hit 'generate'. Why are cameras, image editors, etc, tools…

[deleted]

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

#470

Post by shagie »

Ray20 wrote: post #459
iamacyborg wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.

Will there be any downsides?

Every bit of open source is founded on the license enforced by copyright and the ability for the creator to authorize the creation and distribution of derivative works.

Without it, anything that is published could be taken (once the copyright has expired), repackaged in some user inaccessible way and resold.

It is copyright that enforces the license of GPL. Without copyright, no license on creative work has any teeth.

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