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> he had no input in creating the work (effectively a lie) What is the lie? If you give loose instructions to another person to create a work, who holds the co
by Ansil849 5y ago
> he had no input in creating the work (effectively a lie)
What is the lie? If you give loose instructions to another person to create a work, who holds the copyright, you or the person who created it? Giving input is irrelevant to being the copyright holder.
- paxys 5y agoWe aren't debating ownership between two people. The lie is that there is no computer in existence that can produce work "without any creative input or intervention from a human author". Until the day a machine spontaneously becomes self aware and decides to draw something, this policy is a non-issue.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rtpg 5y agoI believe that the USPTO will have disagreements on this. And like many policy issues there's going to be a bit of a Lemon test regarding what this means. Of course a human needs to set up a program and run it. But I think that this policy is saying "you can't show up with an enumeration of a bunch of things in an attempt to 100% speedrun patents". Like at least prove you tried the thing out a bit! "Did you come up with this idea?" can have different answers. "Yes" is one. "I wrote a program for a computer to apply a bunch of regression on other ideas and spit this out for me" is also "yes", but a different flavor that is closer to "No".
- eesmith 5y agoThe USPTO likely figured this out 50+ years ago. After all, there have been computer-generated writings and music for even longer than that. In "Computer Music", Scientific American, Vol. 201, No. 6 (December 1959), pp. 109-121 , available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24941187.pdf https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24941187.pdf we can read about 'chance' and 'almost random' music: > A second and rather well-known example of chance music is Mozart's "A Musical Dice Game." This piece, one of many similar "compositions" produced as parlor games in the late 18th century, consists essentially of several dozen assorted measures of music, the order of which is determined by rolling dice. A more modern random work, "Imaginary Landscape" by the American composer John Cage, is "scored" for 12 radios and thus derives a strong element of randomness from regional and temporal variations in radio programs. .. > John R. Pierce of Bell Telephone Laboratories, an authority on information theory, has demonstrated other approaches to the composition of simple "probability music." In one, a sequence of chords is chosen by means of dice rolls and a table of random numbers; in another, a series of volunteers each contributes a measure. A number of European composers have produced more elaborate random music electronically by causing random sequences of electrical signals to trigger sequences of tones. ... It then goes on to describe how the author worked on the Illiac Suite for String Quartet. Again, this is the 1950s.
- conradev 5y agoThere is also the brute force approach (from 2020) to generate every possible melody and release it under the Creative Commons: https://youtu.be/sJtm0MoOgiU https://youtu.be/sJtm0MoOgiU
- Akronymus 5y ago"I set up a program that truly randomly generates designs and another that verifies it for x purpose. This generated design is a novel one" What would that count as?
- Ansil849 5y agoThe question is what is the limit of the creative input? If you sit someone or something down and tell them to draw, do you own the copyright or who/whatever did the drawing?
- staticman2 5y agoWho owns the copyright in a collaboration is irrelevent to the legal question of whether something is copyrightable. The answer to your question is, if an artist teams with someone telling them what to draw, ownership might depend on whether they have a written contract addressing this, whether they are in an employer/ employee relationship,or the implied nature of the collaboration. Depending on these factors, they may co-own the copyright, one of them may own it, or neither of them may own it (for example, ownership might be with their employer). But, if no human is involved, there is nothing that may be copyrighted. This came up when a gorilla grabbed a camera and took a selfie. As I recall, it was deemed no human was involved so the picture was not copyrightable.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoThese are interesting questions. If you write instructions you have the copyright to them. A computer program is a set of instructions for the computer. So whoever wrote the program has the copyright, right? But whoever performs those instructions should have the copyright to the "performance" I think. So in principle I could think that the computer performs the instructions and thus can have the copyright to the "performance" but not to the instructions. I'm thinking about music, and "scores" written by composers, but performed by musicians. An interesting special case is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3 . Do the performers have a copyright to the performance when they are following the instructions/score which says "do nothing". :-)
- staticman2 5y agoThere needs to be a minimum threshold of creativity for something to be copyrightable. It's a low amount of creativity, snapping a photo at a painting is even enough for copyright of the photo of the painting being recognized by the photographer, but there needs to be some creativity. A computer isn't doing anything creative at all so shouldn't have any performance copyright. Calling a computer's work creative would be like claiming my pants are being creative when I put them on in the morning. It doesn't make much sense to me. The designer of the pants might have copyright, but the pants themselves do not.
- mr_toad 5y agoI doubt self awareness is a necessary or sufficient condition for either spontaneity, or creativity. There are plenty of lesser intelligences on Earth that create (like spiders or beavers).
- MrYellowP 5y agoBut that's not creativity. There's no virtually unlimited variety of types of spiderwebs and there is no virtually unlimited variety of types of damns a beavers build. If there were, we'd know. Yet, all we ever see is pretty much always the same. While it's impossible to be creative without creating, it's perfectly possible to create without being creative. We call that "copying". In case of spiders and beavers, they simply have the necessary originals/blueprints "built in".
- juancb 5y agoThat's a strong claim about human creativity. Based on what do you assert that human creativity is virtually unlimited?
- Dylan16807 5y agoThere are lots of computer systems out there that can create a very interesting synthetic image out of a single word. If you input one normal word, and take the first output you get, you have performed no creative input or intervention. But the output is something that easily would have been copyrightable if a human had drawn it.
- boolemancer 5y agoIs picking a word not a creative endeavor?
- cobbzilla 5y ago“Until the day a machine spontaneously becomes self aware and decides to draw something, this policy is a non-issue.” To further agree with you — The day the AI files its own legal appeal to its own rejected copyright application — that is when this policy might start to change
- MrYellowP 5y agoPersonally I hope that, at that point, policy doesn't change and instead people start doing something about rights for AI going too far. AI can produce results 24/7, every day, non-stop, as long as you don't pull the plug. Given the connected nature of the world nowadays, it's also reasonable to assume that all AI will be connected to each other, so we wouldn't even be able to "pull the plug". So once AI gets copyright, AI will eventually get to patent things. When that happens, AI will rule the world, because there's no end to the things it can come up with. Imagine the creative genius of a billion Leonardo Da Vinci all being part of a single entity. No fucking thanks.