5 ms·

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright

Many commenters seem to be under the impression that "because I made something, it is copyrightable". That's not how it works. What is protected under copyright is determined by long processes of lobbying, legislation, lawsuits, and court cases. For example: a melody is copyrightable, a chord progression is not, even when the chord progression is so unique as to be the primary intellectual asset of a piece. (Look up contrafacts from the bebop era!) Another example, the rules around the copyright of a sound recording are very different from those of the intellectual property of a song. Only specific things are copyrightable. There is nothing unusual (from a legal sense) in the government and others taking a stance on which things those should be and under what circumstances. You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time. I don't see how they could go with a different stance given that all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright (IFF it is copyrightable, that is). This will fall apart it if it's possible for a company to have AI spew out eleventy-billion variation of training input and declare them all copyright. Don't forget that in the early 90's we went through an era of records being yanked off the shelf at great cost to labels when the sampling laws finally settled. (Anyone else remember the appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of Us3's "Hand on the Torch"? fond memories!)

Bjartr 4y ago
> all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.
- iainctduncan 4y ago
  I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world of music publishing....
  - dublinben 4y ago
    Correct. The law requires it to be “fixed in any tangible medium.” Such as transcribing onto paper, recording onto record, exposed onto film, etc. Merely thinking, saying, playing, singing, dancing, etc a newly created concept is too ephemeral to be a recognizable act of authorship.
    - wongarsu 4y ago
      Well, almost any proof that you danced that concept would be fixing it to a tangible medium. That rule mostly just rules out heresay, eyewitness accounts, and other such methods of "proving" that you created something
  - auggierose 4y ago
    Putting it on a website is enough.
mikehollinger 4y ago
The issue to me here is that code is a literary work. Literary works are copywritable. Except that AI generated works without human authorship aren’t per this. Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one comment or another was “this will be an interesting bit of case law.” Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish precedent for the next half-century. :-)
- statop 4y ago
  It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.
  - iainctduncan 4y ago
    A bit more like a sampler than a xerox machine... but sampling laws got clarified eventually too!
  - visarga 4y ago
    That form of AI has already been invented long ago, it's called simply Copy & Paste. GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that matter do that?
    - statop 4y ago
      If you think copy and paste is artificial intelligence then there probably isn't much of a discussion to be had here. Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained ML models. The model is not problem solving or intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt) "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers..." To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from the internet should be issued a copyright for typing "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and submitting the resulting image. At the same time, I read a post like this one: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no objection to copyright being assigned. I think the difference is the human authorship, and I think the Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.
pmoriarty 4y ago
"You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time." Rights are a legal fiction anyway, so there are no a priori rights to anything.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Rights are consequences of valie decisions that cannot be deduced from facts, so there are only a priori rights.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    They're only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, because that's pretty much what a "right" is: a definition. They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > They’re only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, A priori truths are, exactly and only, those things that are true by definition (and only exist within a particular axiomatic framework.) You’ve described exactly why rights can only be a priori, but used it to deny that they are. > They don’t exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence. If things exist before they are defined by humans and human knowledge of them comes as a result of experience with their existence, that knowledge is a posteriori. You’ve marshalled a cogent explanation of why rights cannot be known a posteriori, but then presented as an argument for why they cannot be a priori.
      - pmoriarty 4y ago
        I think the difficulty we're having in communicating here is that I'm not using "a priori" in the Kantian sense as being in contrast to "a posteriori", but rather in the colloquial sense of "having a prior existence". It's also irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make how or whether humans have knowledge of some pre-existing things (through experience or through some other means). Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have to differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and because they've essentially been brainwashed in to thinking that way through education, socialization, the media, peer pressure, parenting, etc.. So my view and Kant's view on this differ significantly, and while I give him credit for these terms, I don't subscribe to his views and don't feel bound to use these terms in the way Kant or Kantians would have me use them.

Bjartr 4y ago

> all that is required to copyright a written work is to write it and declare it copyright You don't even need to declare it. Declaring it only affects things like whether infringement is "willful" or not when deciding penalties. If you create a (US) copyrightable work, you retain the copyright by default. For it to not be under copyright you have to explicitly place it in the public domain.

iainctduncan 4y ago
I could be wrong, but I think I remembered reading that in music at least, you have to do something with it (like capture it on paper or recording). I seem to remember reading this came about to prevent people from being able to say something was copyright because they maintained they had written something say 10 years ago but just not gotten around to recording it - and then wanted to sue. But this is vague memories from reading about the bizarre and convoluted world of music publishing....
- dublinben 4y ago
  Correct. The law requires it to be “fixed in any tangible medium.” Such as transcribing onto paper, recording onto record, exposed onto film, etc. Merely thinking, saying, playing, singing, dancing, etc a newly created concept is too ephemeral to be a recognizable act of authorship.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Well, almost any proof that you danced that concept would be fixing it to a tangible medium. That rule mostly just rules out heresay, eyewitness accounts, and other such methods of "proving" that you created something
- auggierose 4y ago
  Putting it on a website is enough.

mikehollinger 4y ago

The issue to me here is that code is a literary work. Literary works are copywritable. Except that AI generated works without human authorship aren’t per this. Interestingly this came up when copilot was announced and one comment or another was “this will be an interesting bit of case law.” Well now we have to see who wants to go first and establish precedent for the next half-century. :-)

statop 4y ago
It isn't AI, it's a glorified Xerox machine.
- iainctduncan 4y ago
  A bit more like a sampler than a xerox machine... but sampling laws got clarified eventually too!
- visarga 4y ago
  That form of AI has already been invented long ago, it's called simply Copy & Paste. GPT combines prompt, context and knowledge, it selects and adapts code. It even does problem solving: above average human rating on easy problems and 20% over humans on medium level problems. When did the xerox or parrot for that matter do that?
  - statop 4y ago
    If you think copy and paste is artificial intelligence then there probably isn't much of a discussion to be had here. Yes, very smart and talented people have released ground breaking and amazing tools leveraging massively trained ML models. The model is not problem solving or intelligent in any sense of the word (take it from oai: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt) "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers..." To be back on topic, I don't think some sweaty dude from the internet should be issued a copyright for typing "Minnie Mouse wearing a pikachu t-shirt!" into DALL-E and submitting the resulting image. At the same time, I read a post like this one: https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw https://andys.page/posts/how-to-draw and I have really no objection to copyright being assigned. I think the difference is the human authorship, and I think the Copyright Office has made a pretty good first swag.

pmoriarty 4y ago

"You have no a priori right to copyright something because you fucked around with a prompt for a long time." Rights are a legal fiction anyway, so there are no a priori rights to anything.

dragonwriter 4y ago
Rights are consequences of valie decisions that cannot be deduced from facts, so there are only a priori rights.
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  They're only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, because that's pretty much what a "right" is: a definition. They don't exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > They’re only consequences in the sense that definitions are consequences, A priori truths are, exactly and only, those things that are true by definition (and only exist within a particular axiomatic framework.) You’ve described exactly why rights can only be a priori, but used it to deny that they are. > They don’t exist before they are defined by humans, so in that sense they do not have an a priori existence. If things exist before they are defined by humans and human knowledge of them comes as a result of experience with their existence, that knowledge is a posteriori. You’ve marshalled a cogent explanation of why rights cannot be known a posteriori, but then presented as an argument for why they cannot be a priori.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      I think the difficulty we're having in communicating here is that I'm not using "a priori" in the Kantian sense as being in contrast to "a posteriori", but rather in the colloquial sense of "having a prior existence". It's also irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make how or whether humans have knowledge of some pre-existing things (through experience or through some other means). Since you brought up axiomatic frameworks, I'll have to differ on that as well, as I don't think the majority of humans that talk about rights do so based on any kind of axiomatic framework, but rather on their biases and because they've essentially been brainwashed in to thinking that way through education, socialization, the media, peer pressure, parenting, etc.. So my view and Kant's view on this differ significantly, and while I give him credit for these terms, I don't subscribe to his views and don't feel bound to use these terms in the way Kant or Kantians would have me use them.