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Shenzhen court rules AI-written article has copyright
- flatfilefan 7y agoThat’s your definite Turing test. Stamped, sealed, delivered.
- schoen 7y agoThe Turing test as defined by Turing is interactive and conversational, not about an AI producing a particular artifact.
- kerkeslager 7y agoThe original Turing test had the AI attempting to imitate a woman, which is not only demonstrates conversational ability, but an understanding of complex ideas like gender. Incidentally, I think this can actually be a very low standard, depending on context. We tend to think of the Turing test as being performed by academics, in a lab, where everyone is Very Serious. But if you put real humans on i.e. Omegle (with no video), they typically type with poor grammar and say "random" sounding things that quite plausibly could be said by an AI. Additionally, the preponderance of spam scammers demonstrates that many people are quite gullible, unable to differentiate between a Nigerian scammer and a legitimate representative of their bank. Given this, I think we already passed the Turing test, not by bringing AI up to the level of humans, but by bringing humans down to the level of AI.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y agoThat's a fairly depressing way of looking at it. https://xkcd.com/1414 https://xkcd.com/1414
- kerkeslager 7y agoThat XKCD comic makes a good point: grammar ability is a poor measure of intelligence. Perhaps I was wrong to think of it as "bringing humans down".
- umanwizard 7y agoGrammar ability is a fine measure of intelligence. Adherence to arbitrary conventions in situations where they’re unnecessary is, on the other hand, a poor measure of grammar ability. Do you really believe that most people who write “u” in an SMS are unaware that it’s written “you” according to formal conventions?
- gpm 7y agoChinese court rules... Do any of us have any clue how Chinese copyright law works? It's probably not the same as American copyright law. What are the requirements set out by Chinese law to be copyrightable?
- tnzk 7y agoI don't know but since they seem to be a member of the Berne Convention, it doesn't differ largely from of US?
- gpm 7y agoThe Berne Convention isn't that precise. For example, consider that collections of information are copyrightable in most of Europe and not copyrightable in the US.
- Tomte 7y agoThat's distinct from copyright, and even named a "sui generis right" (meaning "of its own kind").
- lucb1e 7y agoWhile at the same time: > The TRIPS Agreement [which the USA is part of] requires that copyright protection extends to databases and other compilations if they constitute intellectual creation by virtue of the selection or arrangement of their contents, even if some or all of the contents do not themselves constitute materials protected by copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right So I don't quite understand whether data sets like OpenStreetMap or Google Maps are copyrightable in the USA. (Note that this concerns the underlying data, not the graphics like map design or street/satellite pictures.)
- jay_kyburz 7y agoAlso, we don't have fair use here in Australia. My partner loves reminding me that the development of a search engine like google is illegal here in Australia.
- jimnotgym 7y agoShouldn't the copyright therefore belong to the robot? The company is therefore not party to the ip infringement case. Now as an employee my ip belongs to my employer, but I am paid for this. A robot couldn't enter into a contract without 1) being paid (consideration) or 2) the intention to create a contract. Therefore if robots are to assign copyright they are going to need training about contracts.
- hashmal 7y ago> Shouldn't the copyright therefore belong to the robot? I would consider the robot to be a kind of pencil or typewriter.
- wpietri 7y agoOnly if the robot has its own corporate entity. Otherwise, like any machine, it's not a person under the law.
- jimnotgym 7y agoThen how could it produce a copyrightable work? The Berne convention only applies to 'Nationals and residents' of a country. Therefore if a court has held that the robot produced copyrighted material, then the robot must be a person.
- wpietri 7y agoBecause under the law, it didn't produce the work. Look at all the AI-driven visual art we're seeing happen. Copyright goes to the artist who set up the system and then selected the work, because that's the actual creative activity. Creators have always used tools. The tool isn't what gets copyright, no matter how elaborate the tools. Once the tools have consciousness, drive, and self-determination, we might think otherwise. But that's not where we are today.
- jcranmer 7y agoI don't know about Chinese law, but the US concept is "work made for hire". This is satisfied by one of two alternatives, the first being "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment." If you believe that an AI has sufficient personhood to be capable of authorship, then it is not unreasonable to presume that it is being employed by whomever is running it. In the US, there are three factors that govern whether or not someone is an employee. These are: > Control by the employer over the work. For example, the employer determines how the work is done, has the work done at the employer’s location, and provides equipment or other means to create the work. > Control by employer over the employee. For example, the employer controls the employee’s schedule in creating the work, has the right to have the employee perform other assignments, determines the method of payment, or has the right to hire the employee’s assistants. > Status and conduct of employer. For example, the employer is in business to produce such works, provides the employee with benefits, or withholds tax from the employee’s payment. Looking at those factors, it is really hard to argue that an AI is not an employee, as far as US law is concerned.
- 93po 7y agoLooking forward to the day AI is used to generate billions of books and then compare them to every new release by a human. Then the patent/copyright trolls come out and sue human authors for copyright infringement because their awful AI book that is 50% gibberish has all the same elements and character names as the human author's book
- nablaoperator 7y agoThose billions of books probably violate the copyright of other books themselves.
- ouid 7y agoI don't think this is the caveat you think it is.
- bjornsing 7y agoA billion is probably a very small number when compared to the cardinality of the set of all possible/reasonable books.
- slavik81 7y agoThat's not how copyright works. In your example, the human author did not copy anything, and are thus legally in the clear.
- 93po 7y agoIn practice it is my understanding that this is how copyright works in the US. There doesn't need to be any intentional infringement - just the fact that it infringes is enough. If someone came up with "Harry Potter" as a main character name on their own they still wouldn't be able to publish a novel with that title.
- dane-pgp 7y agoSo are you saying that J.K. Rowling could be sued by the copyright holders of the 1969 film "Carry On Camping"? https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064133/trivia?item=tr2738534 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064133/trivia?item=tr2738534
- bhouston 7y agoIf they own articles then they may own patents. I view some current contradictions in what ai owns or not.
- micimize 7y agoWhy wouldn't this be the case? In what sane legal system would one not own the work they published just because it was generated in part or full by an AI? If company B lifts company A's AI and starts generating articles with it, the suit would then be about the code itself, just like with websites, video games, etc.
- rileymat2 7y agohttps://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-basics/ https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/faqs/copyright-basics/ "Finally, to receive copyright protection, a work must be the result of at least some creative effort on the part of its author." So the question is, who is the author and if it was machine generated, did it take creativity? The algorithm took a lot of creativity, but did the output that is being copyrighted? I mean I would come down on the side of yes, but it makes for an interesting case.
- throwawayjava 7y ago> if it was machine generated, did it take creativity?... but did the output that is being copyrighted? In the US, this question has been settled since at least the 1990s (e.g., in the context of videogames). The output of algorithms is, in general, copyrightable, although there are some rather common-sense exceptions. The question isn't whether you can copyright the output of an algorithm. The more salient question, in my mind, is whether the output of ML algorithms belongs to the owner's algorithm or to the owner of the training set.
- derefr 7y ago> It's just that the owner of the training set -- not the owner of the algorithm -- is the one with the valid claim to copyright. Not all that different from a pop song made by editing together licensed samples, no? In that case, the song is certainly a derivative work of the samples, and so the producer of the song needs to get derivative-works-allowed licensing from the samples’ authors (which is what you must necessarily get when buying samples from a sample library, for them to be of any use at all.) The produced song is then its own work with its own copyright. Sometimes, larger samples (like reused vocal performances) require payment in, essentially, “equity”—a percentage of the song’s royalties are transferred as royalties to the sample. But in most cases, the sample is purchased for a flat fee, and there is no ongoing relationship between the revenue of the song and the revenue of the sample. Is anything different if you replace “song” with “news article” and “samples” with “training set”?
- michaelfeathers 7y agoThe easiest way to escape AI hype-thinking is to replace "AI" with "computer program" in your mind whenever you see "AI" in an article.
- ineedasername 7y agoI didn't see anything that specified who owns the copyright. Tencent, I presume? It also seems like a self-evident ruling. I don't see much difference, except a matter of degree, between computer-generated prose in this case, and something like LaTex. Page composition (graphic design) is generally covered by copyright [0]. In fact just about every creative content has some form of technological intermediary. An "AI" algorithm, or even something more basic, performs touch-up work on a photo. The photographer didn't do it, they just hit the button, just like whoever setup the system for Tencent. So I just don't see how courts could hold that copyright wouldn't apply in a case like this when so much content depends on computational generation of some sort. [0] https://www.commarts.com/columns/is-it-true-that-copyright-doesn-t-protect-graphic-design https://www.commarts.com/columns/is-it-true-that-copyright-d...
- EGreg 7y agoThe issue is that the AI can generate all viable versions of the article by front-running someone else’s style. Our society is built on the assumption that attackers are inefficient or dumb.
- ineedasername 7y agoIf the AI is generating content using a corpus which 1) has copyright attached (say Matt Levine's content for Bloomberg) and 2) isn't owned by the person/corporation that developed the AI, then you're absolutely right and waters are muddied. An argument could be made that the end-product is transformative enough to be its own things, eligible for copyright, but use and, presumably, copying of the original content into a corpus would seem a violation of that copyright. On the other hand, if Tencent owned the corpus, that isn't really an issue. Similarly, there have been automated finance articles for more than a decade using knowledge extraction algorithms against things like earnings reports, and copyright of those reports has not been an issue. Admittedly, that may only be because those releasing the reports do so in part to get the word out, and so they want reporting to be done on them. Even if they had a copyright claim that it wasn't fair use, they may not have the incentive to enforce it. Regardless, this all opens up some fascinating discussions of the agency of AI, what constitutes true AI vs. a simple program or algorithm, assignment of who actually would own the copyrights of computer generated content... I think it's going to take some time for the law to catch up to technology on these topics.
- joshspankit 7y agoOh god. 12 trillion dollars to the first person who creates an AI that creates every permutation of basic writing. Can we please just throw out all copyright/patent laws and start from scratch with reasonable terms? (like 5 years, or maaaaybe life of the creator if they keep filing paperwork to confirm they want it.)
- 3pt14159 7y agoEh. That's essentially just rand() with a fat disk. The real task is choosing which permutations to select and publish. I could easily have a websites where any URL you went to was a valid article. For example, example.com/my-article-text-is-here would map to "my article text is here" but the point of creation isn't when you randomly enter in the URL, the point of creation is when some selection of tokens is chose for the actual article, and realistically the combinatorial explosion of human language has us covered.
- joshspankit 7y agoYou have a point. But with a “the right” AI (presuming humans can cause it to be made), you would instead patent the essential building blocks. Like patenting the arrangements of atoms that make up proteins instead of patenting every single possible arrangement.
- burpsnard 7y agoIt's been done : http://www.artmarcovici.com/qentis http://www.artmarcovici.com/qentis
- joshspankit 7y ago!! Well played. I’ll admit I am actually not sure if those claims are real. How did you hear about them?
- egman_ekki 7y agoThere's also Library of Babel: https://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/ ...which contains all texts up to 400 characters.
- jurschreuder 7y agoCould you not just brute force write any article possible and own the copyright on any possible article ever written? Just publish every letter combination possible somewhere.
- inimino 7y ago1. How much storage would that take? 2. Anytime you think you've found a clever "gotcha" that nullifies an entire area of legal doctrine, smack yourself in the face and then repeat "the laws are made and interpreted by people, not machines" one hundred times.
- somerandomness 7y agoThere are some subtleties. Models like GPT2 are trained using many copyrighted documents whose authors could claim it is derivative of their work.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 7y agoA few relevant points regarding copyright law.[1] 1. Copyright is generally held in "works of authorship", which is to say, the work of an author. Whether or not a computer program (AI or otherwise) is an author is the first question in this case.[2] 2. Copyright law provides protection against unauthorised copying of a work. Independent creation is not a copyright violation, for all those who've suggested composig all possible (or for the more efficiently-minded, probable) works of a given length. If another party independently creates a similar work (in whole or part), there is no copyright violation. 3. Copyright persists only in expression and not in the meaning or function of a work. This is in particular contrast to patent and trade secrets law. The Chinese ruling, as described, fails multiple tests and would not qualify under present general copyright law. Though the possibility of the law changing given changing uses and practices does exist. I don't expect in the near term that this case will have much significance. By way of highlighting the ... interesting dynamics ... posed by increasing use of AI in creating content -- various systems creating de novo faces, images, audio, or video, as well as text, as examples -- does give some pause. What are the implications of creating such content via AI where the content itself is entirely outside the scope of copyright law? ________________________________ Notes: 1. US-centric, though generally applying to WIPO / Berne rules. Not legal advice. 2. 17 USC 102(a) https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
- bmarkovic 7y agoWIPO / Berne rules are guidelines. Not even in the Western Europe which aims for "feature parity" with US copyright laws are things the same (case in point: treatment of copyright and patent ownership of things invented while employed, yet not at work or in relation to work). So they simply do not apply even broadly to a case that was processed in China, especially not in the level of deep US-centric scrutiny you applied to it. That said, I don't see any of the "multiple test" this ruling fails. It has simply posited that verbatim copying of the article published on one website to another website without prior agreement is still copyright infringement, regardless of the fact that the article itself was generated by software/AI. Nothing more, nothing less. I find it hard to imagine that a court in any other country would rule any differently.