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In that case it's very plausible that none of that is copyrightable in the first place, because copyright requires human activity. That's what caused the monke
by dale_glass 4y ago
In that case it's very plausible that none of that is copyrightable in the first place, because copyright requires human activity.
That's what caused the monkey picture hubbub. Since apparently the monkey made its own picture, nobody has the copyright of that, and it's in the public domain. This was even though the artist tried to make the case that they engineered the situation itself by placing camera equipment such that a selfie was likely to happen.
It's also well established that collection of facts and works devoid of human creativity are not copyrightable. So for instance an alphabetical list of businesses in a given city, or feeding a classical painting through a scanner are not copyrightable.
So there's a very plausible argument to be made that unless a human is heavily involved in generating the specific artwork, it's just in the public domain. The actual code would be protected, but the randomly generated results are extremely likely to be in the public domain.
Now this is still an area in doubt and I think it's plausible that some of them are copyrightable. If you spent 3 hours trying to get Dalle2 to spit out the exact thing you want, and tweaked stuff a hundred times, that might be enough human input and you might own the copyright of that. But that's just a guess, and so far nobody knows how it will go, and what requirements a court dealing with this issue will devise.
So IMO for the time being artists shouldn't put rely too much on selling generative artwork, because it could well turn out that it'd be completely legal for me to use all the images on FXhash for any purpose I wish without paying a cent for it.