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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

#471

Post by johnisgood »

silon42 wrote: post #450
johnisgood wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> without human intervention There is human intervention though when I prompt the AI. Without me, the AI would not even have generated the photo in the first place.

IMO, the prompt is more clearly copyrightable than the output image... which is also the derived work of all the training data.

I agree, but what if we account for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43345936?

Mainly:

> Humans derive their ideas from impressions (sensory experiences, or in terms of AI, the training model) and the ideas they form are essentially recombinations or refinements of those impressions. In this sense, human creativity can be viewed as a process of combining, transforming, and reinterpreting past experiences (impressions).

We humans do it all the time, TBH.

By this logic or view, nothing can be copyrighted.

I don't know, it is all so shady and a grey area.

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

#472

Post by manwe150 »

heywoods wrote: post #372
manwe150 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my understand is that because the work itself is already covered by different laws (eg trespassing), you had the opportunity to make a verbal contract with the person who took the photo. And the same in reverse: because they used your camera, they implicitly agreed for you to have the right to that copy of their work. If they didn’t get the copyright automatically, then they wouldn’t be able to assign it to y…

Assuming I read this right, and that’s a big assumption, do I have this.. right? The guy in my hypothetical below knows the copyright law and is making a legal request. guy is walking by family and is asked to take their photo guy takes photo same guy asks for a copy of the family photo awkwardness intensifies ————- I really liked what you wrote and appreciate your knowledge you brought to the thread, but what I real…

I think that depends what you mean by legal request. The guy is not making a request of the legal system, so no, it is not specifically a legal request in that sense. However, if someone did make a legal request later, the testimony of this exchange might be introduced as evidence that they had a entered into a contractual agreement verbally to give the guy a right to have a copy of the photo for his private use. (Remember that the family also have a legal right to their own likeness, though it is a privacy law, not copyright, so there are multiple dimensions here as to who has the initial rights in the interaction). Replace "family" with "celebrity" and I think you'd have a plausible scenario that might end up in court on occasion.

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

#473

Post by sejje »

thereisnospork wrote: post #205
jedberg wrote: post #33

I'm not sure how this actually matters. Knowing this ruling exists, why would anyone ever claim an AI created their art without human assistance? Even if the AI created the art just from the prompt, the human still made the prompt. Even if the prompt was "make art". I just don't understand how you could ever have AI art without human intervention. Is there a legal definition of "human intervention" that has some mini…

Not the least contrived situation, but I could imagine an inanimate object object falling from a shelf during an earthquake (a bonified 'act of god') which enters a 1 or 2 letter prompt and generates an image if the AI interface window was left open.

I've got a better, probably incoming situation:

I ask a deep-thinking LLM for a blog article, and to deliver that, it requests images from another LLM.

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

#474

Post by sejje »

bilbo0s wrote: post #325
Aerroon wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As kids we did an art project where you mixed colors with some yoghurt-like substance. You drop it on the paper and then fold it. This created these beautiful arrangements of colors. Does this mean that those works are not copyrighted either since the kids didn't actually direct where each color goes? Every time you do this you'd get a substantially different picture too.

Every time you do this you'd get a substantially different picture This is actually a bad example. It's too easy for an IP attorney to bring in an expert witness,(read: physicist), and blow it out of the water in a courtroom. I won't go into the details, but basically, you got different arrangements every time because the human did different things every time. In the case of generative AI, you get different arrangeme…

The human is using a seed, whether implicitly or explicitly.

You can generate the same thing every time.

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

#475

Post by johnisgood »

sejje wrote: post #460
johnisgood wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am? Am I understanding you correctly?

No, because I was asking.

I deliberately added:

> but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am?

We prompt the AI. I do not see how AI generated art cannot be copyrighted, TBH, but I am against copyright in general (or the way it is done abroad).

Must read:

https://mises.org/mises-daily/patents-and-copyrights-should-...

https://fee.org/articles/mises-on-copyrights/

TL;DR, FWIW:

Mises supported intellectual property rights, including copyright, as a necessary legal tool in a free-market economy to incentivize creativity and innovation. He viewed intellectual property as a socially constructed right to protect creators' labor but cautioned against excessive or monopolistic extensions that could harm competition and economic efficiency.

Rothbard opposed intellectual property rights, including copyright, as state-enforced monopolies that interfere with the free market. He argued that ideas, being non-rivalrous, cannot be owned like private property. Rothbard believed intellectual property could be protected through voluntary contracts, without state involvement, in a truly free market.

To say on topic:

Mises: Likely supports copyright for AI-generated art if the human user contributes creatively (prompt, modifications).

Rothbard: Opposes copyright for AI-generated art, as he believes intellectual property should be based on human labor and not state-enforced monopolies.

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

#476

Post by shagie »

eastbound wrote: post #386
johnnyanmac wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

It protects the photographs that I've taken from the rich to be able to steal it and reproduce them much more cheaply than I can.

It protects the open source contributions that I've made from the rich, by being able to take them and hide them away in a product that doesn't need to abide by the license enforced by copyright.

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

#477

Post by thewebguyd »

mubou wrote: post #457
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Wow, that last "photo" is especially damning. I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and retake... (I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have to. Some phones' RAWs are actually…

They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light. The only way at this point to improve photo quality out of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far, everyone has chosen doing it in software.

Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount of post processing, some is always going to be necessary if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.

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

#478

Post by blacksqr »

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…

> A computer cannot be the author but 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.

That is exactly not the case. US law specifically requires that a copyright can only be given to something an author has fixed into a tangible medium of expression. It is the act of fixing itself that makes an item copyrightable.

The law specifically excludes any process or procedure by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed from copyright protection.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

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

#479

Post by 1718627440 »

Lerc wrote: post #265
aithrowawaycomm wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real issue is that the monkey (or Stable Diffusion) cannot be sued in civil court for copyright infringement, so they can't be granted copyrights in the first place: it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal responsibility. Note that a human-made curation of AI or animal art is protected by copyright (e.g. you can copyright an AI art coffee table book). The original case involved an AI-generated graphic…

>it makes no sense to have one-way streets of legal responsibility. That seems to be a very flawed argument. I am perfectly fine with parents having a legal responsibility to take care of their children without the children owing any legal obligation to their parents. Imagine being required by law to act in the interests of your financial adviser. It would almost be codifying the reality.

They do a have a legal obligation though. Otherwise chores would be unpaid child labor.

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

#480

Post by blacksqr »

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

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

Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end result.

US copyright law specifically states that only works fixed into existence by a human author can be copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed.

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