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But the photographer took the picture, determined the framing and composition. A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt,

But the photographer took the picture, determined the framing and composition. A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. Their pulling it from a pile is not an act of creation, and therefore does not qualify. You have to CREATE a work, not critique/currate it. At best you have an 'anonymous work' by Title 17. An “anonymous work” is a work on the copies or phonorecords of which no natural person is identified as author. The fact that it is a curated 'anonymous work' does not make it somehow more copyrightable.

shadowgovt 4y ago
The picture was there in electromagnetic flux; the photographer just got in the way of the photons. I think a similar argument can be made that in the infinite space of stable diffusion solutions, asking for one is just getting in the way of the noise. If a photograph is art, a human saying "this shook noise is worth showing people" is art. Does the equation of copyright change if the artist says "I want a boat on a calm sea" and starts from a white triangle and blue rectangle? If not, there must be some point of human contribution of information between "words into the stable diffuser" and "using Photoshop on a canvas starting blank" where the work becomes copyrightable. Where is the line? > A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. If I take a blank canvas, set color to [200, 10, 10], and click in the corner with the paint bucket, my contribution is five parcels of information (compressible to one, the color), and I get to claim copyright on the whole ruddy square that results. Especially if I name it "Ruddy Square" and sell it to the MoMA.
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In your case, you would not be able to copyright that piece of art. You can't own colors or dimensions. You could copyright an installation of the art piece, so that no one else could display a [200,10,10] colored piece of art with the same dimensions you used and call their installation 'Ruddy Square', but that is the only copy protection you would be given.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In general, not if those prompts were given to a human who does the actual work. Unless that human was contracted under a work-for-hire agreement, in which case absolutely yes. > You can't own colors or dimensions Interesting. I was mistaken and in the specific case of a square of a particular color, you are quite right. https://www.owe.com/resources/legalities/legalities-15-is-a-shape-copyrightable-how-to-get-appropriate-rights-when-you-commission-graphic-design/ https://www.owe.com/resources/legalities/legalities-15-is-a-... This surprises me because I've observed you can own zero volume for a duration in the music space. I'm not sure why the visual space would differ, but the interpretation of copyright is extremely path-dependent law so I shuldn't be surprised if they do. https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/ https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/ That having been said, I suspect that while simple shapes are not copyrightable because they fail a uniqueness and common-usage test, the output of a stable diffusion run does not fail such a test, being a unique artifact that has never been seen before.
    - ROTMetro 4y ago
      The creator would still own the copyright and have to assign it to the person that hired them. It's that same as when us software engineers get our names on patents and then assign them to our employers. I'm surprised more people in HN are not familiar with how intellectual property rights work.
      - shadowgovt 4y ago
        What you have just described matches no mechanical process I've undergone getting my name on a patent my employer owns. At no time did I receive a patent that I then assigned to my employer. Such assignment is included in my employment contract. I think that may be a hair-splitting on the process; point is it is possible to write a contract where work done by someone else has its copyright assigned to a contracted employer. But honestly, that entire point is less interesting than the question of how many quanta of work one has to put into a mechanism-facilitated process to be able to claim copyright of the result. So paint-bucketing one square is insufficient for unrelated reasons of originality (the inability to copyright a shape). But Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" (1930) was just a few squares and lines and was copyrightable. So clearly, it doesn't take too many horizontal and vertical black lines and full-block fills to create original art. If I write a small script and put it in the public domain to generate Mondrian-like output and hand it to you, and you run it twelve times and pick your favorite, is there any reason you couldn't copyright that one? What's the important difference between picking the output of the script you ran on your hardware and drawing a few grids and paint-bucket-filling yourself? Is it not two paths to the same result: a novel Mondrian-style image that you created? How much intention is needed to make it copyrightable vs. how much random-algorithm output?

shadowgovt 4y ago

The picture was there in electromagnetic flux; the photographer just got in the way of the photons. I think a similar argument can be made that in the infinite space of stable diffusion solutions, asking for one is just getting in the way of the noise. If a photograph is art, a human saying "this shook noise is worth showing people" is art. Does the equation of copyright change if the artist says "I want a boat on a calm sea" and starts from a white triangle and blue rectangle? If not, there must be some point of human contribution of information between "words into the stable diffuser" and "using Photoshop on a canvas starting blank" where the work becomes copyrightable. Where is the line? > A copyright owner for AI would be claiming to own their contribution, the prompt, but not the automated machine generated portion, the image. If I take a blank canvas, set color to [200, 10, 10], and click in the corner with the paint bucket, my contribution is five parcels of information (compressible to one, the color), and I get to claim copyright on the whole ruddy square that results. Especially if I name it "Ruddy Square" and sell it to the MoMA.

ROTMetro 4y ago
Maybe. Everything from back when I was a real person and dealt with copyright, patent, and trademark lawyers tells me otherwise, but I know this from the tech industry side/tech industry lawyers and not art specifically. My reading of Title 17 tells me otherwise. But maybe you are right. And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In your case, you would not be able to copyright that piece of art. You can't own colors or dimensions. You could copyright an installation of the art piece, so that no one else could display a [200,10,10] colored piece of art with the same dimensions you used and call their installation 'Ruddy Square', but that is the only copy protection you would be given.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > And maybe museum/gallery owners actually own the copyright of the works they 'find' and display, especially if the gallery gave the artists 'prompts' for what they wanted the art to contain. In general, not if those prompts were given to a human who does the actual work. Unless that human was contracted under a work-for-hire agreement, in which case absolutely yes. > You can't own colors or dimensions Interesting. I was mistaken and in the specific case of a square of a particular color, you are quite right. https://www.owe.com/resources/legalities/legalities-15-is-a-shape-copyrightable-how-to-get-appropriate-rights-when-you-commission-graphic-design/ https://www.owe.com/resources/legalities/legalities-15-is-a-... This surprises me because I've observed you can own zero volume for a duration in the music space. I'm not sure why the visual space would differ, but the interpretation of copyright is extremely path-dependent law so I shuldn't be surprised if they do. https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/ https://edition.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/23/uk.silence/ That having been said, I suspect that while simple shapes are not copyrightable because they fail a uniqueness and common-usage test, the output of a stable diffusion run does not fail such a test, being a unique artifact that has never been seen before.
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    The creator would still own the copyright and have to assign it to the person that hired them. It's that same as when us software engineers get our names on patents and then assign them to our employers. I'm surprised more people in HN are not familiar with how intellectual property rights work.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      What you have just described matches no mechanical process I've undergone getting my name on a patent my employer owns. At no time did I receive a patent that I then assigned to my employer. Such assignment is included in my employment contract. I think that may be a hair-splitting on the process; point is it is possible to write a contract where work done by someone else has its copyright assigned to a contracted employer. But honestly, that entire point is less interesting than the question of how many quanta of work one has to put into a mechanism-facilitated process to be able to claim copyright of the result. So paint-bucketing one square is insufficient for unrelated reasons of originality (the inability to copyright a shape). But Piet Mondrian's "Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow" (1930) was just a few squares and lines and was copyrightable. So clearly, it doesn't take too many horizontal and vertical black lines and full-block fills to create original art. If I write a small script and put it in the public domain to generate Mondrian-like output and hand it to you, and you run it twelve times and pick your favorite, is there any reason you couldn't copyright that one? What's the important difference between picking the output of the script you ran on your hardware and drawing a few grids and paint-bucket-filling yourself? Is it not two paths to the same result: a novel Mondrian-style image that you created? How much intention is needed to make it copyrightable vs. how much random-algorithm output?