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> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. > For example
by EMIRELADERO 4y ago
> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it.
> For example, when an AI technology receives solely a prompt from a human and produces complex written, visual, or musical works in response, the “traditional elements of authorship” are determined and executed by the technology—not the human user. Based on the Office's understanding of the generative AI technologies currently available, users do not exercise ultimate creative control over how such systems interpret prompts and generate material. Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output.
> For example, if a user instructs a text-generating technology to “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare,” she can expect the system to generate text that is recognizable as a poem, mentions copyright, and resembles Shakespeare's style.
> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text.
> When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship.
> As a result, that material is not protected by copyright and must be disclaimed in a registration application.
This is the crux of the argument for me.
- badkitty99 4y ago[dead]
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoBased on this reasoning, does that mean that you could not claim copyright over a picture captured by a motion sensor camera. Basically you instructed it to capture when it determined movement and the camera determined how those instructions are implemented in its output.
- kevingadd 4y agoHas anyone tried to claim copyright over that before? I wouldn't be surprised if it was rejected.
- beerdoggie 4y agoYes, definitely. Trail/nature cam photos fit this description.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- GauntletWizard 4y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
- netr0ute 4y agoI'd think so, considering how security camera installers never put any effort into capturing footage themselves and are usually the only ones to have the opportunity to do so.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- markive 4y agoAlso look at all the post processing and AI that goes into smartphone cameras right now. The human element doesn't even choose which photo this is done algorithmically and the photo is stitched together in lots of different ways. The human just prompted: 'Now!'
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- brookst 4y ago…as long as you don’t count choice of subject matter, shooting angle, composition, crop, or moment to shoot to be creative choices.
- pmoriarty 4y agoWe don't need to invoke smartphones here. There's no more or less creative input from a human in traditional photography.
- Retric 4y agoTiming is only one aspect of creativity. In most settings a video camera’s output is copyrighted because of how you select the location and angel to film. Motion capture has all of those elements, and simply doesn’t capture 99.9% of the possible images. ie: Someone picked a log crossing the river as a place where something interesting will happen and they setup the shot to look interesting. Which is the general argument why such setups fall under copyright. Though as always there are many edge cases.
- World177 4y agoThere was a case last year where a person sued a content creator on YouTube for distributing parts of their accidental livestream. [1] The argument for fair use was that there was no creative input, so fair use. Though, I really do not know, as I think images and videos can be copyrighted exactly for the reason in your comment. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1Tzqc5vk4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1Tzqc5vk4
- hammock 4y agoHow is setting up a motion camera on a log not similar to setting up a prompt for ChatGPT?
- brookst 4y agoThe camera doesn’t decide what to put on the picture?
- hammock 4y agoIt does… or at least the human doesn’t.. it’s motion activated
- Retric 4y agoMotion capture rigs are doing capture whatever trees/rocks/buildings etc the person setting it up aimed at. The only thing motion capture does is pick interesting times, but you can write software that does the same thing with a video.
- tantalor 4y agoYou could argue the person who set up the camera chose the angle or frame, just like a normal camera operator.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoIn the same way that the person using ChatGPT chose the prompt?
- tantalor 4y agoNo.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoHow are they different?
- throwawaylinux 4y agoI disagree, because instructing the device the circumstances to capture the image, whether it's a timer or motion or some other detector or your direct button press, that is not the only element of photography. They're saying the only creative elements of the work were done by machine. If you asked me to write a poem about copyright law in the style of Shakespeare, is that something you can copyright, or a work derived from something you can copyright? I don't think so. It's not that producing a prompt for a writer might not be a somewhat creative act itself, but that's not really recognized by copyright law. Ideas aren't copyright, works are. Colloquially people might agree that a work could be significantly derived from an idea, but I don't think that's how copyright law itself works. Linux was written from scratch, copying no code from Unix and therefore is not a derived work or infringing on Unix copyright. Unquestionably it faithfully copied many ideas verbatim from Unix, the invention or development or discovery of those ideas were probably the most substantial creative contributions that Ritchie and Thompson had, and the code itself relatively mundane (though expertly written) by comparison. Those ideas/inventions are not classed as copyright works though.
- layer8 4y agoThe concept of “threshold of originality” plays a role in whether something is copyrightable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality Your question therefore cannot be answered a priori. The copyrightability has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.
- dukeofdoom 4y agoMade the larger context needs to be considered. Being in a place at the right time. The choice of lens, the type of camera, the direction of the sun. A camera captures a moment in time, and that moment will never be repeated. If AI removes blemishes from a face, it's still a photo of a face, and that face only existed that way in that moment.
- acomjean 4y agoNo. You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles. If a monkey steals your camera and takes a selfy you can’t copyright that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_dispute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disp...
- dragonwriter 4y ago> You instructed the camera, placed it and set the angles. And I instructed the model, and set its tuning parameters.
- Jensson 4y agoSomeone else could just use the same prompt and get the same results, would you sue them for copyright infringement then? Do you think that makes sense?
- famouswaffles 4y agoDon't overlook the fact that agencies like the USCO are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of determining stuff like this. They move first because they're on the front lines, as it were, but they can be overruled by the courts and the courts can be overruled by congress. 100% this will be litigated and likely altered in the coming months/years.
- yafbum 4y agoI'm still hoping it stays that way. That'd be a fantastic direction for works in the public domain.
- techdragon 4y agoYeah but that assumes people are honest about the providence of their content and let you know up front that it was produced by an Ai and is thus not protected by copyright… and given the preponderance of copyright info in website footers, I expect this will be an error of omission rather than actively claiming incorrectly. By simply not giving individual articles a more specific copyright note mentioning the AI all you have to go on is a generic copyright statement in a footer and thus can only safely assume it’s protected.
- jxcole 4y agoI think it's possible that some generous person determines a sequence of prompts that generate, say novels, and then pipes these prompts into a program causing thousands or even millions of wholly varied novels to be generated in the public domain. I imagine this is what the OP meant.
- BarryMilo 4y agoI've been changing my mind a lot on AI these past few weeks. I don't think the price is what stops most people from reading books. People already have access to countless works they don't have time to read, adding a bunch of soulless ones to this seems like it won't change much.
- randombits0 4y agoCareful! I’ve always felt that, as written, copyright should not apply to most software. Since only creative expressions may be copyrighted and functional expressions are not copyrightable, it’s very hard to match up the copyrightable portions of software with those that are not. Requiring a declaration of what parts are and are not copyrightable for software would be a major shift in policy and require major changes in software methodology. It’s not a big jump to think that any output of AI of software code output would not be copyrightable, regardless of original origin. Another example of “Software wants to be free.”
- brookst 4y agoNot advocating copyrightable software, but it seems clear to me that if databases are copyrightable because they represent curation, then software must be too. Any line of code, probably not. But a program as a whole, sure. Otherwise I think you blow up music copyrights too, since a single note isn’t copyrightable and a song is just a bunch of individual notes. At some point, choosing, ordering, and organizing a collection of non-copyrightable quanta produces a copyrightable work. And I think it had to be that way.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoI think the open question is whether software is in the realm of patents or of copyrights. It's not unreasonable to suggest the former, since software is kind of like a widget that does stuff, except virtualizing the "widget" part to run on a generic widget of sorts. Copyrights traditionally applied to works that you would consider "artistic" rather than "inventions." What you're suggesting, about a minimal work, is litigated endlessly with respect to music copyrights (since a lot of pop music is very similar, arguments about plagiarism get crazy), but is part of the law already.
- brookst 4y agoAren’t dry, non-fiction books copyrightable? I don’t think “creative” necessarily means “artistic”, just making something where there was nothing. It’s hard for me to see a software program as a whole as uncreative in the same way logarithm tables are. I agree it’s a complex are with no easy answer. But I really think that software, like words and notes and numbers, scales from the generic and unprotectable to the highly creative and protectable. I guess I’m saying we shouldn’t invalidate copyright based on the medium being software, any more than we would for the medium being audio.
- foota 4y agoWhat's the difference between this and a corporation owning the work of an employee?
- layer8 4y agoThe difference is that a human employee would normally own it, and only because the corporation pays the employee to do it does the ownership transfer to the corporation, whereas in the case of an AI there is no copyright to begin with, because it’s an AI and not a human that creates the work. This is because the existing law ties copyright to human creations exclusively.
- snickerbockers 4y agoThe difference is that the employee is a person.
- tqi 4y ago> When an AI technology determines the expressive elements of its output, the generated material is not the product of human authorship "Expressive elements" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Is there a a point at which a prompt becomes sufficiently complex or detailed that it would quality?
- layer8 4y agoYes, the point at which the prompt, and not the AI, is found to determine a sufficiently substantial part of the expressive elements. From what I’ve seen it’s probably difficult to make a prompt that specific with the current models.
- basch 4y ago> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. What if I generate it 50 times and cobble together a final product from the variants, choosing which line and word and rhyme I like from each sample? Where is the line between LLM and thesaurus/dictionary? The comic book the office rejected seems to me to have crossed a line of significant human editorial discrediting after the generative fact, and they didn’t care.
- layer8 4y agoThe document addresses that: > In other cases, however, a work containing AI-generated material will also contain sufficient human authorship to support a copyright claim. For example, a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that “the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship.”
- telotortium 4y agoThey allowed the comic book author to copyright the accompanying text and the overall arrangement of the images into a comic book, but not the images themselves.
- News-Dog 4y agoSoup anyone? 'Andy Warhol Copyright'
- greensoap 4y agoPretty sure the office said the arrange of the book was itself protectable but the individual images were not. https://www.onmanorama.com/news/world/2023/02/23/comic-book-graphic-novel-zarya-ai-images0copyright-midjourney.html https://www.onmanorama.com/news/world/2023/02/23/comic-book-...
- basch 4y agoDidn’t the author claim to be photoshopping and compositing the images themselves? If I render 6 characters, composite them into a background and run the complete composite through another generative step to clean it up, where do I fall?
- antibasilisk 4y agoI never thought what would end copyright would be artificial intelligence, but I'm glad at least something positive came out of it.
- anticensor 4y agoThis is only applicable to a creativity based copyright hence this might actually trigger a shift to a copyright system more like the British or the Japanese ones.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago> But the technology will decide the rhyming pattern, the words in each line, and the structure of the text. But what if the prompter then takes the AI text, changes some of the rhymes, perhaps adds a word here or there, does it suddenly come back under copyright.
- chii 4y agoLet's take it to the extreme - if you randomly outputted noise as a picture, that picture is not copyrightable (or ditto with random letters/numbers and printed it as a book). It feels to me that the copyright office is using this similar line of logic, to make the claim that the resultant work is not copyrightable if it was wholly generated using _only_ a prompt and an AI.
- person3 4y agoIt's a bit odd though. What if you built your own ML model and trained it over a set of data that your wrote yourself. Would the work generated by the AI based of your prompts be not be copyrightable? The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI. Why can't we just realize that the world is very different now, and just create new laws? Instead we keep trying to arbitrarily interpret the law in a biased way to try to fit our modern goals as best we can.
- chii 4y ago> The original copyright laws were thought up way before even cameras, and we're still trying to apply them today to generated AI but the original laws worked well with cameras didnt it? The legal idea, that unless a human had creative input, it won't have copyright, doesn't fall afoul of ai generated content. There's nuance of course - what counts as creative input etc. Of course, a new paradigm is possible with the advent of AI, but it would make copyright _looser_, rather than tighter, imho (and it would be to the progress of the arts and science to do so). But i don't see why it is fundamentally needed.
- smeagull 4y agoWow, someone needs to notify photographers about this immediately. No more copyright for them.
- s1mon 4y agoThe notice explicitly covers photography. > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making > unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright > protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a > photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead > created by a camera. > The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's > Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far > as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the > author.”
- smeagull 4y agoMuch like the writer of a prompt. The notice is stupid.
- kccqzy 4y agoDid you read the linked article? > In Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, a defendant accused of making unauthorized copies of a photograph argued that the expansion of copyright protection to photographs by Congress was unconstitutional because “a photograph is not a writing nor the production of an author” but is instead created by a camera. The Court disagreed, holding that there was “no doubt” the Constitution's Copyright Clause permitted photographs to be subject to copyright, “so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author.”
- pmoriarty 4y ago"so far as they are representatives of original intellectual conceptions of the author." "representatives of original intellectual conceptions"? Wouldn't that only to apply to photos made with some preconceived idea of what you wanted the photo to look like? What about spontaneous, "point and shoot" photos? What about a photo that I take with my eyes closed, without intent? And how original is your typical family snapshot or wedding photo? They're about as generic and unoriginal as you can get, yet there's no doubt they're copyrightable.
- mikehollinger 4y agoI noticed this as well. The implication to generated code is pretty astounding tho. What about all those (c) foo 2023 prologs you see all over the place? Will there be arguments that specific lines weren’t written by a human so therefore the entirety the claim isn’t valid? Or will there be refactors to push generated code out to a well known path or construct (akin to a header / implementation or some such)? And on top of that, what if your “secret sauce” comes back to some form of generated construct (looking at you, Whoop, with your “strain” and “recovery” scores. Further still - can a “machine-readable medium” that was written by a machine be patented?
- undefinedzero 4y agoAs per this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35192038, I reckon the whole is “creative enough” and would be protected as the developer only used parts and cherry picked and combined what they needed.
- michrassena 4y agoIs the lack of human authorship the gist of the argument? Can you claim copyright on the output from a compiler? Or is this like work for hire, where you just give instructions to the creative professional?
- visarga 4y agoIf it's an optimising compiler like the ones used in deep learning, then it might have a substantial contribution.
- Stratoscope 4y ago> “write a poem about copyright law in the style of William Shakespeare” Oh, this can be fun. “Write a story about copyright law in the style of Franz Kafka.” In a world that was both strange and familiar, a man named Josef K found himself entangled in a complex web of legal disputes. It all started when he received a letter from a law firm claiming that he had violated copyright law by using an image on his blog without permission. Josef K was bewildered by this accusation. He had always believed that his use of the image was fair and reasonable, and he had no idea how he could have infringed on anyone's rights. Nevertheless, he was summoned to appear before a tribunal to defend himself against these charges. The tribunal was a labyrinthine bureaucracy, with endless corridors and dimly lit rooms. Josef K wandered through the maze, trying to find the right office, but every door he opened led to another hallway or another set of stairs. Eventually, he found himself standing before a stern judge who peered down at him from behind a towering desk. The judge had a sour expression on his face and a stack of papers in front of him. "Mr. K," the judge said, "you stand accused of violating copyright law. Do you have anything to say in your defense?" Josef K stammered nervously, trying to explain his side of the story. But the judge cut him off. "You do not understand," the judge said, "the law is the law, and it must be obeyed. Your intentions are irrelevant. You are guilty simply by virtue of having used the image without permission." Josef K tried to protest, but the judge was unmoved. He handed down a verdict of guilty, and ordered Josef K to pay a hefty fine and remove the image from his blog. Josef K left the courtroom feeling confused and defeated. He had always believed that he was a law-abiding citizen, but now he found himself caught in a nightmarish world where the rules made no sense and justice was arbitrary. As he wandered through the labyrinthine corridors of the tribunal, Josef K realized that he would never be able to escape the clutches of copyright law. He was trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare, where even the slightest misstep could result in a crushing blow from an inscrutable legal system.
- dllthomas 4y agoIt's not clear to me that this position is wrong, but it seems wildly inconsistent with our policy that every photograph I take is protected by copyright, no matter how inane and low effort. I have images I generated with Craiyon (then Dall-E Mini) into which I put way more creative effort than any of the photos on my phone.
- visarga 4y agoTake a photo of your screen! BAM. solved
- josephcsible 4y agoDidn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel.... rule that that trick doesn't work?
- laserbeam 4y ago> these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist I find this very reasonable and a great analogy. However, today, can one not copyright commissioned work? Can a company not own copyright for work produced by its employees?
- Robotbeat 4y agoI find the much closer analogue to be instructions for taking a photograph. And that IS considered copyrightable. There are how many free parameters for a photograph? Position in space (3 degrees of freedom), position in time and (if we're not talking 360deg cameras) 3 degrees of freedom for orientation. Maybe another degree of freedom for exposure time, etc, but for an automatic camera those are taken for you. So let's say 7-8 degrees of freedom. 32 bits each for position on the earth (64 bits total... and this is optimistic as vast majority of pictures are on land, near cities, etc), 16 bits for elevation (8 bits likely more than enough for most), 12 bits for each rotational degree of freedom (overkill), 32-36 bits for time. So about 150 bits of unique information? Add another 50bits if you have a manual camera (vast majority of pictures aren't taken that way nowadays), and you're left with 150-200bits. So about the same entropy as a sentence with a dozen or two words in it. All the rest is done by a machine. And this is considered enough for photography, but not enough for machine output. Doesn't make much sense to me. (A Haiku is also about 120 bits, and it is copyrightable.) The actual GOOD prompt results I've seen typically require a lot more than a dozen words, whether ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion or whathaveyou, and typically involve quite a lot of trial and error.
- ROTMetro 4y agoIn that scenario the original artist is granted copyright and assigns it to the company. Another option would be for the artist to 'license' the work to the company and keep copyright ownership themselves. Since there is no original artist to be granted copyright then there is no one to assign it to the company so no copyright under current statute. I and others got so many downvotes here for pointing this out previously.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
- RHSeeger 4y agoI'm curious where the "line" is, though. If I do a web search for a term, I get various results. As I refine my search, the results get closer to what I want. Eventually, there comes a point where it's possible to recognize that there is "skill" associated with crafting a good web search. To some extent, the same is true of crafting what you tell the AI to generate for you; especially as AIs become more complex in what they can be told to do. So, given that, at what point does enough creativity go into the crafting of the instructions that it _can_ be considered, at least in part, a work by the person giving the commands.
- avereveard 4y agoNever for the generated work, because a human isn't doing it, but you may be able to copyright the prompt
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoThe prompt isn't a creative work, it's constrained by a technical need (producing a desired response from a generative computer system).v
- RHSeeger 4y agoSo is work done in a program like photoshop, and that is considered a creative work.
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoThe steps you take to make a work in a graphics program, eg "open an image, circle area with lasso tool, apply content-aware-fill" are not copyrightable. The method and product are different things.
- heavyset_go 4y agoBeing good at using a search engine doesn't mean that the produced results are your IP.
- deleted 4y ago
- undefinedzero 4y ago> Instead, these prompts function more like instructions to a commissioned artist—they identify what the prompter wishes to have depicted, but the machine determines how those instructions are implemented in its output. If you commission an artist, the produced result becomes yours and you own copyright on it. How different is it with AI? The AI did not creatively decide to do something. An order was placed, it fulfilled it, and ownership was transferred.
- rtpg 4y agoBecause when you commission someone _they initially get copyright_ and then assign it to you.
- amoss 4y agoI wonder how this will apply to code that comes out of systems like copilot?
- mejutoco 4y ago> If a work's traditional elements of authorship were produced by a machine, the work lacks human authorship and the Office will not register it. I imagine many people have a workflow where they generate images with Stable Diffusion and retouch in a painting app, do some inpainting and retouch. It seems all of those should be covered by copyright (nothing above makes me think they won't, at least).
- barrkel 4y agoControls nets also blur the line here. You can start out with a generated image selected from hundreds of samples (human input: curation), do a canny edge detection or fake scribble, then start tweaking and adjusting it to remove elements that over-determine the output, adding or overlaying sketches to add elements, then iterate on prompts, scale up with img2img, fix smaller elements with inpainting, and yet more curation. And that's before we start talking about finetuned models, model merging, LoRA and so on. It's too early to say where we will end up with AI generated works. In the search for control over output, there's a lot more creative human input needed today. This is in part down to limitations in the integration of current AI, and a dialog with a chat bot, or even a voice conversation combined with a pointer may be enough to convey intent in the future. We just don't know yet. I also wonder if there's a parallel with the relationship between modern artists and artisans. For example, many marble sculptures by modern artists are actually carved by artisans in Italy, following directions from the artist. I expect that the artisans are doing work for hire and the copyright is retained by the artist with the idea. https://www.thedailybeast.com/damien-hirsts-army-of-geppettos https://www.thedailybeast.com/damien-hirsts-army-of-geppetto... > “More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with words.” Sounds like a prompt?
- mejutoco 4y ago> “More conceptual artists have no work space at all, simply imagining ideas for a work, which they communicate with words.” Very interesting too, since a lot of modern artist work like a small company, where they have employees that execute on the artist's vision. The copyright still belongs to the artist, though, because of the employment contract.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoBut following from that, a machine can not create a copyright violation either.
- 6nf 4y agoOk but how will they know?
- mmaunder 4y agoWhat if I created the training data and instantiated and trained the AI? If this still applies it suggests an AI has human standing and can compete with me for ownership of intellectual property by negating my rights, rather than me being a programmer and it being merely an algorithm.