That was a terrible ruling. It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams) there isn't even "a button."
>It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams), there isn't even "a button".
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine.
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
You can blame the governments for all sort of inefficiencies but any operation that impacts taxes runs a tight ship in most developed nations, this include things like copyright law, census, and anything statistics.
If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
Perhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.
My understanding is that you get back a percentage from SynthID regarding how confident it thinks the text is generated by AI or not. The question is what percentage would be considered undeniable that it is AI generated or require more than just your testimony to prove that you actually did the work yourself. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 (Google Deepmind) was using a "Watermark detectability is measured using the true-positive rate (TPR) when the false-positive rate (FPR) is set to 1%" for instance in their research paper. This 1% was set arbitrary just for the research paper but what percentage should it be set to?
"Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright."
If that is faithful reading of the law, that makes sense. I know a number of people who use AI, but none of them (that are making anything actually useful) have the output "entirely generated" (aside from some POC tests that never see the light of day).
I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.
This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it).
If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.
And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.
We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.
Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.
You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and saw the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
The knowledge wasn't obtained illegally or illicitly, immorally perhaps.
Illegal entry/trespass is a crime regardless of the method used however.
In your analogy copying the code (online content) isn't necessarily illegal, however using that knowledge without compensation, permission or attribution may be a crime (depending on copyright law, judges rulings etc).
Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
This post is glossing over most of the nuance in EU law.
The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI.
This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
So this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.
You can't enforce those licenses against AI-generated parts, because enforcement relies on the recipient having no other way to avoid copyright infringement.
However, there's no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects. There's already plenty of non-copyrightable code like auto-generated boilerplate.
Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
I don't see an easy test here. Worse, I see the beginnings of a test that is technical and very likely to not match the future of how we will interact with these things. We have to start somewhere but I'm not sure 'Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.' is the right place to start. I think we need more examples of what does constitute 'human-centric' and work from there. I also don't think that any system that says 'you didn't do enough work so it isn't human-centric' works. Any system like that will require a reexamining of copyright in general. There is a lot of low work copyrighted material out there. Just because 'AI' didn't build it doesn't mean the same tests shouldn't apply.
Some examples of why I think this is really hard: Say I build a story generation system. I work hard on building an agent swarm of actors, critics, editors, researchers. I craft into the various agents concepts of story arcs, outlining techniques, character development. I build a huge well thought out process for how to agentically write an actually good story, so long as you give it a title. Heck, I even design and train my own custom LLM with original layer ideas and novel training techniques to use on this system. After all that I then take that final step and give it a title. Do I have no claim to that? I probably put more work and creativity into it than an author would have a book. What if I then gave it 500 titles? 5,000? Would my claim degrade the more titles I fed it? Is it a percentage of work question? What is the core concept here that defines 'human-centric'? What is the cut-off here?
Let's go even further. I don't prompt. I live in a world with unlimited context models. I have a conversation about the book I want it to write. During that process I reject some ideas and accept others. I didn't give it a 'system prompt' but essentially all I did was prompt it and select versions I liked. Is that not human centric? How about if I asked it for advice and it did some editing work on my story? Did that make it not human centric even though the starting text was mine? What if that starting text was 99% replaced with a version 10x as verbose. Defining based on how you interacted with the model (prompted and selected) just seems way to weak to be a clear test.
Information wants to be free. We should simply dispose of copyright. With LLMs, waters that were already muddy are now a thick slurry. And it's only going to get worse.
It's an antiquated mechanism and is far more abused than it is actually used at this point.
it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection?
But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:
- I wrote the prompt (not enough)
- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)
- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
I feel like this question is typed wrong but the same reason someone wants copyright on human work to make money by prevent other people from stealing your work
Given the cost of generating images/text/etc. is much lower when using an AI system, as compared to a human, this seems appropriate. The purpose of intellectual property is to encourage people to invest that time into creating works that benefit others. Perhaps there’s an argument for a shorter copyright period to cover the cost of the compute spent, but certainly one wouldn’t expect AI intellectual property to require a similar level of incentive to produce.
Judges are not at all stupid enough to fall for that. You would get laughed out of court for that. Judges are not computers, and they can not be tricked with these kinds of technicalities.
In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.
>The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
Interesting. In addition to Anthropic's watermark use to prevent model collapse, we can definitively call something copyrighted or not copyrighted. This is a boon to everyone who consumes culture.
That doesn't actually work. Say you took a book and used an AI to translate it into another language. The translation wouldn't have an additional copyright, the way it would if a human had done the work, but the output would still be restricted by the original copyright. So the presence of the watermark does not tell you that the text is public domain.
I thought translations can be copyrighted separately. Their are translators for instance who translate very old texts from other countries/languages and then sell that book/translation using copyright to protect this business models? Not sure but does this mean if you as a human wrote a book in English and then used AI to translate to another language say French then that translated work would not be copyrighted. Not sure how this would work.
Translation, in and of itself, is viewed as a creative work. A translated work has two copyrights: the original, and the translation, with permission needed from all rightsholders to redistribute. A new translation of a public domain work (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey) has one copyright holder, the translator. An existing work (the English translation of The Three Body Problem) has at least two: the original author and the translator.
However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
Lmao. No. Content that is wholesale generated by AI is also not subject to copyright in the US. It relies on the honor system and you can always modify the material juuuust enough that you can claim the copyright. In practical terms, this changes nothing.
If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too.
Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'.
MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright).
The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way.
If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here and it's not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).
It’s been established in the DC circuit, where basically any challenges to copyright office decisions would need to be brought. For all intents and purposes, until the Supreme Court or Congress decide to weigh in, it’s pretty well established that AI generated content cannot receive copyright. There will probably be some decisions around the edges regarding when human editorial input might result in a copyright being awarded to the editor, but it would be very surprising to see the precedent overturned completely, particularly given its grounding in previous caselaw.
Did anyone expect it to go the other way? Europe is more hardcore about copyright than the US, and that's saying something. Germany is practically...well I was going to say they're nazis about it but perhaps that's in poor taste.
It's not surprising, though, since the ECJ held in the Infopaq case that copyright (under the EU Directives) can only exist for something which is the intellectual creation of an author.
Thank god! A victory for everyone who believes in the freedom of information, regardless of what you think about AI.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection; yet, the reality is otherwise.
That’s not how that would work at all. The copyright of a derivative work has no effect on the existing copyright of an underlying work.
If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights.
In this situation:
If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.
> If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection
What in the world makes you think that?
What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...
This matches historical precedent in other nations where copyright was not extended to a photographer when a primate took a photo of themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
That was a terrible ruling. It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams) there isn't even "a button."
Hopefully no judge uses that as precedence.
>It should be about who got the camera there and set it up, not who pushed the button. With automated recording (dashcams), there isn't even "a button".
I'm actually having a bit of trouble thinking of what sufficient societal good there is/would be in granting copyright on raw dashcam or security camera or the like footage? None of those purely mechanical automated systems need a subsidy or encouragement to generate more. Certainly someone can use that sort of thing in the creation of a copyrighted work but what would be the issue with the underlying material in that case being unprotected?
A dashcam could be a safety tool for most people, but it could also be a strategically placed B-cam for a videographer on a shoot.
For what it’s worth, dashcam footage can absolutely be copyrightable.
What if it was a human who took the photo, would the copyright still be owned by the equipment owner / person who set it up?
What if this applied in a photography class? The instructor owns the equipment and helped “set up” the photo. Does the instructor own the copyright?
As software, creative works, science, etc become more and more contributed via AI does that mean all future works will not be copyrighted or patented? Under our current copyright culture and laws obviously not but that does open the question to how much does a human have to contribute and what evidence is required to show that a human contributed enough so that it can be copyrighted and patented. Some time in the future (may be many years) science may become to complicated for humans to understand fully with AI systems researching themselves. Current patent laws in many places including US says inventions created entirely by artificial intelligence cannot be patented. This future may be coming. What will the new copyright and patent laws look like in the future? Do we need copyrights and patents anymore?
It means as long as you can find a few employees who testify that they made "creative input" during the process and nobody can disprove that, you're fine.
It's like things that are already in public domain. Even if you make a coloring book out of paintings in public domain, it doesn't necessarily mean others can just print your book as-is.
You can blame the governments for all sort of inefficiencies but any operation that impacts taxes runs a tight ship in most developed nations, this include things like copyright law, census, and anything statistics.
If companies get slope with creative output to the point that "a few employees" can reproduce it in shadow markets, don't expect to get copyright protection without giving governments revenue and speech-control.
Perhaps but what about individual works done not via a company. Say you are a author and someone falsely detects a AI watermark in your book. Is the testimony you provide enough to override that falsely detected AI watermark? My feeling is that there will be an industry that arises that proves you contributed to the works you want copyrighted.
(I think) the case depends on what AI watermarks are. As far as I know, things like SynthID has practically zero false positives.
My understanding is that you get back a percentage from SynthID regarding how confident it thinks the text is generated by AI or not. The question is what percentage would be considered undeniable that it is AI generated or require more than just your testimony to prove that you actually did the work yourself. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08025-4 (Google Deepmind) was using a "Watermark detectability is measured using the true-positive rate (TPR) when the false-positive rate (FPR) is set to 1%" for instance in their research paper. This 1% was set arbitrary just for the research paper but what percentage should it be set to?
Like being an executive producer
"Content that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence is not protected by copyright."
If that is faithful reading of the law, that makes sense. I know a number of people who use AI, but none of them (that are making anything actually useful) have the output "entirely generated" (aside from some POC tests that never see the light of day).
I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.
This is less relevant for logos & creative works, but things that enable companies to do production will go back to being closely guarded and sharded secrets, which is what the patent system was trying to resolve (though we can certainly argue the success of it).
If companies fail to protect their investments in generating IP, they will stop investing in generating it.
And unless IP generation costs (all in, including the humans telling them what to generate) fall close to zero, it will be bad for the world if companies cannot recoup investments in generating new IP.
We would expect this to hit those industries relying on IP protections the most, e.g. pharma.
> Content that is entirely generated [...]
Take note of the qualifier entirely. If you're working with an agent steering it to produce the results you want, it would be an entirely different story.
Wheres the limit. Would a prompt "Create a system that does x" and no other feedback count? Or do need to do 10 prompts to steer your agent to the results you want. What about just 1 additional prompt. Somewhere there will be a line.
Legal systems are fuzzy. The limit will be what courtrooms decide. There will never be a ">75% of content" law, everything will be left to interpretation, laws are not source code.
Is working with an agent different than constantly editing an image with fine tuning prompts? Both can be entirely generated.
Where is this qualification in the legal language?
Where is the legal language?
Exactly, I don't know how the person I was replying to was making such confident statements about the situation.
Why would copyright and patents exist when the US blatantly stole the entire world's knowledge to train their AI models (and China distillled from it)
Knowledge cannot be "stolen"
You wrote your house's security code on a Post-It note. Somebody came in as a houseparty guest and saw the note, and discretely copied it onto their hand to get access to the house during your next vacation.
Which verb would describe their knowledge of this security code?
Obtained, read, viewed, learned, discovered.
The knowledge wasn't obtained illegally or illicitly, immorally perhaps.
Illegal entry/trespass is a crime regardless of the method used however.
In your analogy copying the code (online content) isn't necessarily illegal, however using that knowledge without compensation, permission or attribution may be a crime (depending on copyright law, judges rulings etc).
"eavesdropped"?
"spied"?
Whatever it is, slapping "steal" on it because what was done is wrong, and stealing is wrong, is the same sloppy logic that the copyright lobby used in the 80s/90s.
If 'steal' doesn't fit, then neither do 'eavesdrop' or 'spied'.
The crime there is using that knowledge illegally to break in.
learned
Does a photo/image that generated/modified by a human-being using photoshop got protected by copyright? I think previously someone does this...
This post is glossing over most of the nuance in EU law.
The AI system must function merely as a tool or instrument (like a camera or Photoshop) guided by the human, rather than acting as the creator itself. The line may get a bit fuzzy case-by-case, but effectively the human must be the creative one, not the AI.
This is not unprecedented. Machine generated technical data, sensor outputs, automated surveilance photography, monkey selfies, purely algorithmic or generative music and such were already disqualified long before AI came along.
So this means you can not use AI for the majority of open source projects since GPL, MIT, BSD, etc are all copyright declarations and they'd be being made for code which you can not copyright.
You can't enforce those licenses against AI-generated parts, because enforcement relies on the recipient having no other way to avoid copyright infringement.
However, there's no issue with including non-copyrightable code in otherwise copyrighted projects. There's already plenty of non-copyrightable code like auto-generated boilerplate.
No it would mean the license does not apply to the parts of code written by AI.
Lots of wild guesses about mixed human-AI copyright in here. Last time I read the copyright office’s statements in this, their stance was basically: The human owns exactly what they contribute. The rest is public domain.
Yes, that is vague. I think the examples were like:
If you paint a symbol and use an AI filter over that to stylize it, you own the symbol aspect of the image but not the stylized final result.
You can own a book of AI images as a curated collection. But, not the individual images.
I don't see an easy test here. Worse, I see the beginnings of a test that is technical and very likely to not match the future of how we will interact with these things. We have to start somewhere but I'm not sure 'Neither mere prompting nor the selection between several AI suggestions is sufficient as a human creative contribution.' is the right place to start. I think we need more examples of what does constitute 'human-centric' and work from there. I also don't think that any system that says 'you didn't do enough work so it isn't human-centric' works. Any system like that will require a reexamining of copyright in general. There is a lot of low work copyrighted material out there. Just because 'AI' didn't build it doesn't mean the same tests shouldn't apply.
Some examples of why I think this is really hard: Say I build a story generation system. I work hard on building an agent swarm of actors, critics, editors, researchers. I craft into the various agents concepts of story arcs, outlining techniques, character development. I build a huge well thought out process for how to agentically write an actually good story, so long as you give it a title. Heck, I even design and train my own custom LLM with original layer ideas and novel training techniques to use on this system. After all that I then take that final step and give it a title. Do I have no claim to that? I probably put more work and creativity into it than an author would have a book. What if I then gave it 500 titles? 5,000? Would my claim degrade the more titles I fed it? Is it a percentage of work question? What is the core concept here that defines 'human-centric'? What is the cut-off here?
Let's go even further. I don't prompt. I live in a world with unlimited context models. I have a conversation about the book I want it to write. During that process I reject some ideas and accept others. I didn't give it a 'system prompt' but essentially all I did was prompt it and select versions I liked. Is that not human centric? How about if I asked it for advice and it did some editing work on my story? Did that make it not human centric even though the starting text was mine? What if that starting text was 99% replaced with a version 10x as verbose. Defining based on how you interacted with the model (prompted and selected) just seems way to weak to be a clear test.
My test would be: Until the AI companies pay back what they have already stolen, then anything that uses AI at all cannot be copyrighted.
I think there is an easy test: if you didn’t write it, it’s not yours.
If we go back 10 years and your friend says “I have an idea for an app, here it is,” and you build it, you own the copyright because you wrote it.
You give an idea to the pile of math calculated of the stolen work of humanity, the math owns it (which it can’t, so no one owns it).
No matter how detailed of a conversation you have with a friend, I don’t think they have justification to claim copyright over code written by you.
That's how you want it to be, but that's not how it is.
Then how it is needs to change.
Information wants to be free. We should simply dispose of copyright. With LLMs, waters that were already muddy are now a thick slurry. And it's only going to get worse.
It's an antiquated mechanism and is far more abused than it is actually used at this point.
Does this mean someone could develop a switch emulator using an AI and Nintendo couldn't win a lawsuit against them?
Does it enable decompilation remasters of classic games?
It feels like AI is a cleanroom laundromat
Not a lawyer, but I'd expect that decompilation creates a derived work which is still subject to the copyright of the original.
Definitely not clean room, quite the opposite.
“That doesn't give you copyright, but it does give you liability for the content.”
Microsoft is using AI generated code in their OS, so does that mean they lose copyright protection in Europe?
1) Does applying a copyright message warrant that the content has not been generated by an AI?
2) If one applies a copyright message to AI generated output, is that fraudulent?
it's sort of non-controversial at the extreme end I think - where there is no human contribution, why should there be protection?
But it just begs the actual question of how much human contribution there needs to be:
- I wrote the prompt (not enough)
- I wrote many prompts and iteratively refined them using distinctly human skill (open question, but loosely seems still not enough, potentially in the EU but maybe in the US?)
- I made minor modifications post-generation (open question, probably enough)
- I made equal or more contribution to the final result (this better clearly have copyright protection or we are in real trouble)
I'd say that any use of an AI trained on people's creations without (real) consent and compensation should not be protected.
This then implies that in the EU, AI-generated content cannot have a license applied? MIT, GPL, CC, etc?
Why should anyone want to have copyright on AI-generated content?
For the same reason they'd want copyright on anything else.
I feel like this question is typed wrong but the same reason someone wants copyright on human work to make money by prevent other people from stealing your work
To profit under intellectual property constructs. As it stands, AI output is effectively in the public domain.
Given the cost of generating images/text/etc. is much lower when using an AI system, as compared to a human, this seems appropriate. The purpose of intellectual property is to encourage people to invest that time into creating works that benefit others. Perhaps there’s an argument for a shorter copyright period to cover the cost of the compute spent, but certainly one wouldn’t expect AI intellectual property to require a similar level of incentive to produce.
Probably unless it infringes on others' copyright as it does...
Does this apply to software?
I will add a pixel by "hand" with software on my computer.
Judges are not at all stupid enough to fall for that. You would get laughed out of court for that. Judges are not computers, and they can not be tricked with these kinds of technicalities.
In fact, the defense of "I wrote the prompts that led to the code that the LLM wrote" would be a much better defense.
That’s not enough to generate copyright protection.
The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
>The creativity requirements may seem arbitrary but there’s a legal distinction between a sculpture and a standard brick.
Or more relevantly, a recipe find on recipe sites (with the author's entire backstory) vs a sequence of instructions. The latter is not copyrightable, even if there was some creativity that went into it (eg. word choice).
Create an “assign copyright” skill?
I mean the copyright has to belong to somebody right?
Interesting. In addition to Anthropic's watermark use to prevent model collapse, we can definitively call something copyrighted or not copyrighted. This is a boon to everyone who consumes culture.
That doesn't actually work. Say you took a book and used an AI to translate it into another language. The translation wouldn't have an additional copyright, the way it would if a human had done the work, but the output would still be restricted by the original copyright. So the presence of the watermark does not tell you that the text is public domain.
I thought translations can be copyrighted separately. Their are translators for instance who translate very old texts from other countries/languages and then sell that book/translation using copyright to protect this business models? Not sure but does this mean if you as a human wrote a book in English and then used AI to translate to another language say French then that translated work would not be copyrighted. Not sure how this would work.
Translation, in and of itself, is viewed as a creative work. A translated work has two copyrights: the original, and the translation, with permission needed from all rightsholders to redistribute. A new translation of a public domain work (Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey) has one copyright holder, the translator. An existing work (the English translation of The Three Body Problem) has at least two: the original author and the translator.
However! Since AI work is noncopyrightable, the AI’s effort in translation is simply ignored. Claude’s The Odyssey would have zero rightsholders, and remain public domain. ChatGPT’s translation of The Three Body Problem would still be under Liu Cixin’s copyright.
Lmao. No. Content that is wholesale generated by AI is also not subject to copyright in the US. It relies on the honor system and you can always modify the material juuuust enough that you can claim the copyright. In practical terms, this changes nothing.
If the AI is treated as an agent during inference, distinct from its user and not merely as a tool, then this should also apply during training too.
Based on this, it seems that AI agents are consuming people's code without permission. The MIT license only gives rights to "any person obtaining a copy of this software".
So the rights are given to a 'person', and the rights pertain specifically to a person who performed the act of 'obtaining a copy of this software'.
MIT license says 'obtaining a copy' and uses the word 'software', not 'code'. 'Software' is to 'code' what 'shop' is to 'building'; if you bought the shop, it doesn't necessarily mean you own the building. These are two different things and require different clauses. MIT explicitly separates the two and emphasizes that the author of the software retains copyrights (presumably over the code as this is the only thing over which they could claim copyright).
The code is different from the software; you can write the exact same software which behaves in the exact same way using completely different code; can be poorly written or well written. The difference is extremely meaningful to the person who invested effort to write the code in a clean way.
If we say that the agent is a separate entity from the person who ran it during inference, surely the same distinction can be made concerning the person who ran the agent during training. So the term 'person' from the MIT clause doesn't seem to apply here and it's not obtaining a copy of the software; it's obtaining copies of the code which is copyright and independent of the software (as the MIT license clearly asserts).
The same is true in the US. This is a nothing burger.
It hadn’t been established yet in the EU. It would be a big deal if it went the other way in Europe so it being the same isn’t a nothing burger.
It hasn’t been established in the US either, despite how desperately some people want to misinterpret the handful of cases so far.
It’s been established in the DC circuit, where basically any challenges to copyright office decisions would need to be brought. For all intents and purposes, until the Supreme Court or Congress decide to weigh in, it’s pretty well established that AI generated content cannot receive copyright. There will probably be some decisions around the edges regarding when human editorial input might result in a copyright being awarded to the editor, but it would be very surprising to see the precedent overturned completely, particularly given its grounding in previous caselaw.
Very clearly established.
AI only = no copyright.
“A Single Piece of American Cheese” got a copyright because it had human involvement in compositing.
Theatre D’Opera did not because it was primarily prompt driven.
Thaler didn’t because he said it was machine derived.
Humans must be involved for a copyright.
Did anyone expect it to go the other way? Europe is more hardcore about copyright than the US, and that's saying something. Germany is practically...well I was going to say they're nazis about it but perhaps that's in poor taste.
It may be a nothing burger for US companies/persons, but the EU is fortunately not governed by US law. This is big news for us here.
It's not surprising, though, since the ECJ held in the Infopaq case that copyright (under the EU Directives) can only exist for something which is the intellectual creation of an author.
It's not big news if you know anything about Europe in relation to IP law. No one expected a different result.
Thank god! A victory for everyone who believes in the freedom of information, regardless of what you think about AI.
Copyright didn't always exist, nor should it continue to. Hell; it must not.
I think the words (read: hilarious 1.25pp pamphlet) of Aaron Swartz on the topic are just too poignant to ignore, given the paths of Reddit (corrupted yet democratic), IP law (malignant yet showing cracks), and government survellience have taken in the Trump era. Despite the dated context... he really says it best:
https://ia800101.us.archive.org/1/items/GuerillaOpenAccessMa...
If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection; yet, the reality is otherwise.
That’s not how that would work at all. The copyright of a derivative work has no effect on the existing copyright of an underlying work.
If you record yourself reading a book, you own the audio recording copyright but it would be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without a license for the underlying rights.
In this situation:
If the AI generates the audio recording of a book, no one owns the copyright of the audio recording but it would still be a copyright violation to reproduce that copy without the underlying rights.
These two things that are quite distinct. Whether something is protected by copyright, it should not be counterfeiting regardless.
> If copyright does not protect AI-generated content, then AI should not be restricted from generating content that falls under copyright protection
What in the world makes you think that?
What is this implication based upon? Where does it say in copyright law that if no copyright arises for your work then it does not infringe the copyright holders' rights? This is completely devoid of logic...