4 ms·

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 pat

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?
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Copyrights are assigned to inventors. How can you legally not create the patent under the inventors' names and then assign the patent to the company? Maybe my company's lawyers were just doing CYA, and granted I took much of the patent stuff on the lawyers word, but I don't think the process you describe is legal. The fact that my company owns the fruit of my labor has nothing to do with the legal requirements of an inventors name being on a patent. Your refusal to acknowledge that these laws require an inventor/artist is the core of my argument. If you generate images in the manner you describe you are nothing more than a machinist plugging in coordinates and generating widgets, not an artist using tools. The generating program meets the 'anonymous artist' portion of the relevant Title code in that case, and you can not copyright it. The office might mistakenly give you copyright, but I don't think it would hold up to a challenge.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    I wanted to thank you for this interaction because I've learned quite a bit about the boundary layer on copyright. I think I see what you're saying in this topic. It looks like the copyright office is perfectly willing to grant copyright on work that uses an AI generator for even a substantial portion of it (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-receives-first-known-us-copyright-registration-for-generative-ai-art https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artis...) but not the whole thing. I suspect there will be a series of cases in the not too distant future to make the boundary line clearer.

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?

ROTMetro 4y ago
Copyrights are assigned to inventors. How can you legally not create the patent under the inventors' names and then assign the patent to the company? Maybe my company's lawyers were just doing CYA, and granted I took much of the patent stuff on the lawyers word, but I don't think the process you describe is legal. The fact that my company owns the fruit of my labor has nothing to do with the legal requirements of an inventors name being on a patent. Your refusal to acknowledge that these laws require an inventor/artist is the core of my argument. If you generate images in the manner you describe you are nothing more than a machinist plugging in coordinates and generating widgets, not an artist using tools. The generating program meets the 'anonymous artist' portion of the relevant Title code in that case, and you can not copyright it. The office might mistakenly give you copyright, but I don't think it would hold up to a challenge.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  I wanted to thank you for this interaction because I've learned quite a bit about the boundary layer on copyright. I think I see what you're saying in this topic. It looks like the copyright office is perfectly willing to grant copyright on work that uses an AI generator for even a substantial portion of it (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artist-receives-first-known-us-copyright-registration-for-generative-ai-art https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/artis...) but not the whole thing. I suspect there will be a series of cases in the not too distant future to make the boundary line clearer.