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

481–490 of 562 posts

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

#481

Post by dcow »

shagie wrote: post #470
Ray20 wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The GPL is considered by its author to be a “hack” on the copyright system to perpetually enforce source availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included. But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we are.

Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for the GPL in the first place. All knowledge should be public domain.

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

#482

Post by CYR1X »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #439
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 your photo of the moon after Samsung uses "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

Oh shit. Who owns your photo if your phone does any amount of software-based manipulation to it? Like making faces look better?? Is this how google claims it can use all of your pixel photos in its AI training?

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

#483

Post by CYR1X »

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…

The other aspect here is you can't copyright an observable truth. For instance, sports companies tried to sue other sports companies for scraping their scores feeds but courts ruled you can't copyright the fact Patriots beat the Falcons 35-30, because that's simply what happened. There isn't any proprietary scoring keeping mechanism. Anyone who observed the game also can determine those numbers. It is an observable truth. So maybe that applies to the raw photo. You are simply capturing what happened from that POV at that moment in time. Sure if you do something with that photo, then it may become more than an observable truth.

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

#484

Post by blacksqr »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #418
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…

Consider these (rhetorical, I am not sure I'm up for the nuanced debate given IANAL) questions: 1. Who owns the rights to a commissioned piece of art? The artist, or the commissioner? Which rights? 2. What about derived works of art made with or without the permission of the original artist(s)? When a book is turned into a film, who "rightfully" owns what? When the Rolling Stones wrote Sympathy For the Devil , did th…

In the USA:

1. The artist owns the copyright.

2. Derived works without permission of the author are illegal, unless under specific exemptions like fair use. The author of a book made into a film continues to own their words, the filmmakers own their original creative contributions to the work. Concepts and themes can't be copyrighted, so unless the Stones quoted Bulgakov's words verbatim, his estate would have no claim.

3. "The ownership of a copyright may be transferred in whole or in part by any means of conveyance or by operation of law, and may be bequeathed by will or pass as personal property by the applicable laws of intestate succession."

4. You'd have to ask the monkey. No.

5. Copyright law only applies to people, so there is no meaning to those concepts.

5-2. Animals and machines are considered property, so property law is applied to them.

6. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

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

#486

Post by madmountaingoat »

torben-friis wrote: post #59
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…

Assisted work is the big clarifier I think Is a picture edited with photoshop invalid when it uses content fill? What about a picture taken with an iphone, where AI could be part of the phone's processing pipeline or even generate details to make up for lack of optical zoom? Does spell correction invalidate a book? what if there's AI rephrasing features at work? Where's the line? I think as you get into those side qu…

I think this specific quote from the article deals with this situation.

> U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel on Tuesday that U.S. copyright law "requires all work to be authored in the first instance by a human being."

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

#487

Post by iamacyborg »

dcow wrote: post #455
iamacyborg wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.

No they really wouldn't. Companies and fans would commission art. We pay our damn food service staff on “would you like to pay a little extra today” tips method. Don’t tell me, especially with zero justification, that creatives depend on the need to control who copies our society’s ultimately culture. There are absolutely other ways and we’re too scared to try them.

> Companies and fans would commission art.

Why would they when they’d have every right to take it for free?

Creative endeavours would be absolutely stillborn if only people wealthy enough to practice their craft could pursue the thing

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

#488

Post by shagie »

dcow wrote: post #481
shagie wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The GPL is considered by its author to be a “hack” on the copyright system to perpetually enforce source availability. Most consider it unnecessarily restrictive and would prefer a world without it, Stallman included. But since Xerox used copyright to sue people trying to fix their own broken copiers, which they owned, here we are. Point is, removing copyright also removes the need for the GPL in the first place. All…

Removing copyright allows a company to take something that is in the public domain, make changes to it and not release the changes.

Yes, the GPL is a hack on the distribution of derivative works... but without those teeth to bite with and enforce, then nothing prevents one from taking some code that is not-copyrighted, making changes to it, and keeping the code to it completely in house while releasing it in a way that is not user modifiable.

The ideals of the GPL (and AGPL) of sharing the contributions back to the community to further progress would be unenforceable and lost.

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

#489

Post by mubou »

thewebguyd wrote: post #477
mubou wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.

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

#490

Post by disqard »

droideqa wrote: post #464
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.

An LLM could definitely output the boilerplate communications that CEOs emit.
Post reply on HN