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US Copyright Office refuses application with AI algorithm named as author
- excalibur 5y agoIf the authors have to be human then so do the owners. Be consistent dammit.
- LegitShady 5y agoGood. I imagine if it was any other way we’d just have a trillion machine learning models making stupid things for the IP ownership and a round of copyright trolling by their operators.
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoGiven that the fee appears to be $45 per work to register the copyright, I'm having a hard time seeing a good business model here.
- LegitShady 5y agoHow long is a book? How much text can I copyright for $45 and then go after people over "excerpts"? I'm not sure but I can see how such a system can be gamed
- nnvvhh 5y agoCopyright exists upon creation, registration is required to sue. They don't need to register them all.
- neallindsay 5y agoRegistration is not required to sue, but definitely makes it easier.
- shagie 5y agoYou can file multiple works as one collective work - https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ34.pdf
- spacemanmatt 5y agoSo the AI has some side jobs on Fiverr
- science4sail 5y agoIs this how the paperclip maximizer scenario gets started? The AI decides to take over the government in order to reduce filing fees.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago"You optimized for WHAT?"
- snek_case 5y agoThis seems like a good thing to me, because with "AI-generated works", there's the potential to generate a massive amount of images and essentially try to pre-copyright a lot of content, so you can then sue people who produce legitimate works that somewhat resemble what you've already copyrighted. Something similar could be done with programming code and transformers. We already have a problem with copyright lasting long after the original author(s) are dead...
- odsb 5y agoCan you not programmatically claim "Human Ownership", like as long as you don't have to be physically present I think you can still achieve what you are saying. I guess what is really "human ownership", maybe i will have to read the article :)
- Teever 5y agoThis seems like a bad thing to me, because with "AI-generated works", there's the potential to generate a massive amount of images and essentially try to pre-copyleft a lot of content, so you could sleep easy knowing that it was no longer possible to sue people who produce legitimate works that somewhat resemble what you've already copyrighted. Something similar could be done with programming code and transformers. We already have a problem with copyright lasting long after the original author(s) are dead...
- charcircuit 5y ago>then sue people who produce legitimate works that somewhat resemble what you've already copyrighted. If people didn't copy your work, but instead created it themself you can't (read shouldn't be able to) sue them. Copyright law protects people from making copies of your work. If someone didn't copy from you copyright law doesn't apply.
- staticman2 5y agoI just posted the same thing, but good luck proving a negetive. (That you never viewed a certain work publically available on a certain web site.) That's certainly a difficulty that could cause you to settle with a bad actor.
- odsb 5y agoThis doesn't make sense. You can make a AI generated work and claim it to be Human.
- moralestapia 5y agoIt makes perfect sense. >You can make a AI generated work and claim it to be Human. That's the point!
- gjvnq 5y agoThat sounds like perjury.
- sacrosancty 5y agoNo more than a photographer claiming authorship for simply pushing a button on his art-generating machine.
- lupire 5y agoPhotographers don't simply push buttons.
- sacrosancty 5y agoExactly, and neither do AI-using artists. In both cases, the machine generates the image while the human decides what it should look like.
- simiones 5y agoThis is excellent, a future where you could use algorithms to generate works of art and profit massively by selling them would be even worse for artists than today's art/entertainment world. Unfortunately it's not clear to me whether this is a ruling that a work created using an algorithm can't be copyrighted (which would be ideal) or if it's just about not listing the algorithm as the "author", which is so obvious it's incredible someone actually spent money trying to litigate it.
- echelon 5y ago> profit massively by selling them You don't need copyright to sell them. In the future, media will move faster than copyright. I imagine telling a machine, "make me a new Star Wars film, but with dragons", and out streams the result. The future isn't going to fit our existing laws or paradigms very well. The laws were written for a different time with totally different expectations.
- Verdex 5y agoYeah. With the pie in the sky being, "make me star wars but with dragons and double check all copyright infringement cases involving star wars to make sure the end result is unlikely to infringe." Edit. Or heck if the input parameters are really as easy as "star wars and dragons" then you just distribute the generator and the input params.
- echelon 5y agoExcept the very idea of a "franchise" will also come under attack when computers can develop narrative, character development, plot devices, world build, etc. Nobody will want Star Wars when a computer can make Galaxy Dragons and turn it into an epic 100 episode saga. Like your Count Dooku memes? Wait until you hear about Lord Drago Starstream. And if the concept of a computer developing all of this still seems as far off as "Level 5 autonomous driving", note that with media there will be lots of intermediate steps with humans still in the loop. Just give humans knobs and dials and a "reset" button. Plot the story on a graph, drag the nodes. Nobody dies with this. Human editors can control for quality. There's plenty of automation opportunity until computers become outright storytellers. Disney and their IP war chest are gonna be toast.
- karaterobot 5y ago> [T]he Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.” U.S. COPYRIGHT OFFICE, REPORT TO THE LIBRARIAN OF CONGRESS BY THE REGISTER OF COPYRIGHTS 5 (1966). This is probably the right call, though it will become increasingly urgent in the future to evolve the rules to consider the nuances of new cases that will certainly arise.
- paxys 5y agoThis is misleading. The copyright office simply needs the work to be registered under a human name, since a machine or AI cannot hold copyright. The process used to create it is irrelevant.
- ghaff 5y agoThis is essentially a stunt. If he used an AI to help him, even substantially help him, and copyrighted it himself, that would be a non-story. Just as it would be a non-story if he used Photoshop to substantially alter something.
- im3w1l 5y agoYes, this paradigm makes a lot of sense in the present moment. In a hypothetical future where there is a long-lived AI agent, acting autonomously over multiple years or even decades it will become less and less seen as a tool used by a human person. But, no need to update policies until then.
- nextaccountic 5y agoBut we already have multi-generational non-person entities: companies. Copyright may be assigned to companies instead of persons. They are just registered under a bunch of people's names, which act as owners (shareholders), and can change over time. In the future, AI entities will probably be registered as companies themselves (or maybe they will be just company assets), and will be owned by people. Which doesn't bode well for strong AI, but I suspect that even after we reach strong AI people will still grasp at straws for many decades or centuries, denying them personhood because they are just software that run on computers.
- dgreensp 5y agoThe amount of autonomy that makes something a “person” has only ever been drastically understated in these sorts of discussions, I find. Like saying a future self-driving taxi would own its own business and keep its profits. That’s like giving a self-driving tractor the deed to the farm. It’s easy to personify things that demonstrate some amount of “agency” (moving around on their own, making decisions), I guess, but lots of things do that and it doesn’t make them legal people who can own property and the like. Even if it made sense to give a deed to a tractor, no one would do it.
- RobertMiller 5y agoThat's a small step in the right direction. Reducing the protection period to something sane would be nice too, but that's probably hoping for too much.
- rsstack 5y agoHow does this affect GitHub Copilot? They used to claim that their AI can create new IP and transfer it to the users.
- GauntletWizard 5y agoIt seems clear to me that modern "AI" Devices and algorithms are not "Persons". The copyright office would surely have accepted it if he had put down "Creativity Machine" as the /medium/, but the author is a legal person or persons (incl. pseudononymous persons, such as corporations [1]) . What would it mean to assign the copyright to "Creativity Machine"? It can't make any decisions or enter into binding legal contracts. Law is by and for persons, and there's been no movement to grant Personhood to the very limited constructs we're calling "AI" right now. I will be first in line to argue for Personhood for actual artificial intelligence, but this ain't it. [1] This is my personal pet peeve - "Corporate Personhood", like explored in "Citizens United", means that corporations are pseudononyms for a group of people, and if it would be legal an individual to do, it's legal for a corporation unless the law specifically prohibits it.
- jcranmer 5y ago> Thaler then requested a reconsideration of the decision, arguing that the human authorship requirement would be contrary to the US Constitution and be unsupported by either statute or case law. ... Feist v Rural? I know it's usually summarized as "sweat of the brow is not valid basis for copyright in the US", but it does this by arguing, as the head notes state: > Held: Article I, Section 8, clause 8 of the Constitution mandates originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. The constitutional requirement necessitates independent creation plus a modicum of creativity. It seems like a lot of the complaints here are against the reliance on 1800s-era cases, but it's the reality that even when modern copyright cases end up before SCOTUS, it all comes back to reaffirming those 1800s cases. (Baker v Seldon, 1880, featured heavily in Google v Oracle, decided 2021; similarly, Feist v Rural [1990] is basically going back and saying that the 1910s-era stuff makes the position clear).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- zeeb 5y agoIn Accelerando by Charles Stross, the fictional venture altruist Manfred Macx "...patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain - not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible mousetraps." Looks like we may not get the set of all possible mousetraps.
- _jal 5y agoMousetraps do not depend on patents to exist. You can still have your mousetrap set, you just can't prevent others from re-deriving the same set.
- Verdex 5y agoThe comment you are replying to was using mousetraps as a metaphor. ...at the end of the actual description of what it was talking about. It's an executive summary, not literally talking about mouse traps. Specifically it was talking about arbitrary problem domains. So ... much more than mousetraps.
- _jal 5y agoWhat makes you think this was unclear?
- digitcatphd 5y agoYear 2050: AI Copyright office system won't accept Human-generated art, requires "AI authorship"
- exdsq 5y agoI’ve been using GPT-3 to generate pornography scripts involving unpopular politicians and it has to write some of the funniest stuff I’ve ever read. Nigel Farage was randomly a goat in one of them, but still leader of UKIP. Osama Bin Laden is almost always hiding in a cave and, in a multiple person love story with European leaders, will almost always fall in love with Putin over the others. In fact one thing I noticed is Putin’s always the dominant partner and will travel to the country of the other, such as Kim Jong-Un, while others are much more passive. Boris Johnson always cuddles afterwards too - in every generation his always ends with a happy romance.
- mark-r 5y agoI'm glad they're at least being consistent with prior decisions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
- j2bax 5y agoAaaa! We got 'em! If AI can't copyright itself, then it won't be allowed to take over or destroy the world (as long as a human and/or patent troll copyrights world domination first). One small victory for mankind!
- mensetmanusman 5y agoAI is a tool like a camera, point it a thing and push go. Each has billions of dollars of global supply chain supporting their manifestation.
- jqpabc123 5y agoComputers don't have "rights". Period. The end.
- Victerius 5y agoThere is at least one potential future timeline where your comment is used by our robot overlords as an example of anti-synthetic sentiments that led to the droid revolution of 2121.
- lupire 5y agoYet they can be accused of crimes and seized!
- bell-cot 5y agoSame as the pry-bar found under the back seat of the burglary suspect's car, eh?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gzer0 5y agoWhat's to prevent someone from claiming that it is "human authored" when in reality it was AI generated? As a test, I was able to generate 20 unique music tracks with AI, and submit them to Spotify, Apple Music, Shazam, Tidal + others and they are now "owned" by myself. This perhaps, will be the bigger problem going forward. Distinguishing between genuine authored content to that of AI generated.
- spacemanmatt 5y agoWhat if we could prove certain software patents were actually the work of AI
- SeanLuke 5y agoFrom Russell and Norvig, a famous story about difficulty in publishing with probably the first such AI-generated work: "Two researchers from Carnegie Tech, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, rather stole the show [at the original Dartmouth AI Conference]. Although the others had ideas and in some cases programs for particular applications such as checkers, Newell and Simon already had a reasoning program, the Logic Theorist (LT).... Soon after the workshop, the program was able to prove most of the theorems in Chapter 2 of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Russell was reportedly delighted when Simon showed him that the program had come up with a proof for one theorem that was shorter than the one in Principia. The editors for the Journal of Symbolic Logic were less impressed: they rejected a paper coauthored by Newell, Simon, and Logic Theorist."
- VectorLock 5y agoHopefully nobody gets the idea to use AI-generated patent applications just to get your name on a patent, and sell that as a service. That would be very unfair to our patent clerks and a serious drain on our current patent system.
- analog31 5y agoIf a machine can combine existing information to produce a new idea, then it fails on obviousness. Also, patents have to get through prosecution, which is still a fraught process.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoThis is clearly the correct decision. If the AI is capable of creative intellectual thought, then his claim to own it is clearly false, because that's slavery, which is illegal. If it's not, then it's not really the author. The person who applied the AI is the author.
- jhncls 5y agoThere is also the story of "Shalosh B. Ekhad", the computer who co-authored many papers in combinatorics. [0] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Shalosh+B.+Ekhad%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22Shalosh+B.+Ekhad%22 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doron_Zeilberger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doron_Zeilberger [2] https://www.wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math/ https://www.wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math/
- lupire 5y ago"Shalosh B Ekhad" is Hebrew for 3.1 (as in π).
- cwkoss 5y agogood
- bo1024 5y agoThere's a really important distinction here. (a) An algorithm cannot be named as an author, name the human who ran it instead. (b) A work produced by an algorithm is *inherently not copyrightable*. You cannot name a human as author instead, that would be fraud if the work was produced by an algorithm. I am reading this as (b).
- _carbyau_ 5y agoSo... if a machine authored work can't have copyright .. can it breach a copyright? A machine trained on disney movies, creates a new Disney movie. Can Disney do anything about it? I am willing to bet Disney would trace it back to the people running the machine quick smart! In which case - like a typewriter - the people running the machine get the copyright. As others have mentioned though, with machine assistance one person can now spam every text(huge space but rules for making it readable would narrow it)/image(larger space)/video(even larger) that could exist. So where is the line drawn?
- elil17 5y agoIt should be noted that, unlike with patents, copyright registrations are not that significant. It's just a way to establish when you wrote a work, like getting it notarized. You have a de facto copyright on all works you create. In the end, it will be up to a court to decide if the copyright is valid.
- dmingod666 5y agoCorporations are people though. Can you go through the same process without mentioning people's names and only mention a company name?
- Proven 5y ago
- MrYellowP 5y agoImagine AI being able to gain copyright for their productions. We'd run out of things to copyright real fast.
- oyebenny 5y agoIranian patent trolls are gonna be so disappointed that they can't troll patents so easily anymore.
- t_mann 5y agoWhat would the point of that (other than scoring a fun legal victory) be? Copyright is meant to protect the rights of creators, to distribute their works and benefit from them as they see fit. The machine wouldn't do any of that, or if it did, there would be a human somewhere in the back actually making the decisions (we're still very far from AGI that could do that could decide to act like this truly on its own).