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US Copyright Office wants to hear what people think about AI and copyright
- mistrial9 3y agocopyright of code, originating under ${LICENSE} ?
- artninja1988 3y agoNon or this makes much sense tbh. The thing about this is that when you commission an artist, the artist is not actually given copyright, but the person who paid the artist is given the copyright. Why is it not the same for promoting?
- dfxm12 3y agoWhy is it not the same for promoting? I think you mean prompting. Commissioning an artist in the context you're thinking of implies a written contract, signed by both parties [0]. This is the first reason where it isn't the same, and I believe is enough to consider new laws in the situation. Even if the new law just codifies the process you're thinking of, it's better to get ahead of the situation, or else we make a mess of things like DMCA, etc. 0 - https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf
- nemomarx 3y agoIs that actually true, absent a contract or agreement that you get the copyright along with the commission? I would think the artist gets it by "default" unless you're also paying for the rights or something?
- jprete 3y agoIANAL, but as far as I know, the artist gets it by default in absence of a contract that specifically assigns it to the other party. It’s possible there are special rules around salaried employees but even then I’d expect almost all busineesses to have a specific condition of employment that the employee’s works are works-for-hire.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mminer237 3y agohttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101#:~:text=a%20%E2%80%9Cwork%20made%20for%20hire%E2%80%9D%20is%E2%80%94 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101#:~:text=a%20%... If an employee makes something at work, the employer is legally the creator of it. If someone contracts someone else to make something for him, the copyright in the work vests in the hiring party essentially when it's part of a larger work and the contract says it's a work for hire. A one-off commission on its own does vest in the artist. (Disclaimer: I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer.)
- jasrys 3y agoIt depends, but yes, usually. Post-1978, the author of a work is also the copyright owner as soon as the work is fixed in a "tangible medium of expression" (written down, recorded, dictated, etc.). The exception to this is when the work was created as a "work for hire" (WFH) [1] for an employer. The rules around what constitutes a bonafide WFH are governed by agency law in the US. The primary court case in this area is The Community For Creative Non-Violence v. Reid which outlines a fairly high bar for a work to be considered a true WFH (it asks questions like: did you go to an office where the employer told you what to do and how to create it, did the employer provide you materials, did the employer pay you as a salaried employee rather than a contractor, how were you treated tax-wise and benefits-wise, etc.). That said, as the copyright owner at the moment of fixation, you can absolutely assign that copyright in writing to anyone you'd like. So functionally, there is usually a backup clause saying something like: "this is a work for hire for us, but, in the event it's deemed not a work for hire, you hereby assign the copyright to us anyway." [1] https://copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf https://copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Violence_v._Reid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...
- mindcandy 3y agoThat was Thaler's argument. He had the first prominent case in this debate. AFAIK, the artist implicitly gets copywrite to the work they created then your contract with the artist transfers that copywrite to you. Thaler tried to argue that he and the AI were in a situation similar to "work for hire" with an artist, but there was no human input to the AI. But, the copyright office holds that non-human entities/events are not granted copyright protection and therefore have no rights to transfer. So, they rejected his claim.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agothe artist is not actually given copyright, but the person who paid the artist is given the copyright. This is only true if it is written in a contract. In general, the artist keeps the copyright. Photography is the same way: Photography studios own the copyright to wedding pictures, school pictures, family portraits, sports functions, and the like. If you pay a photographer to take a family picture, you have to get permission to use that picture for a greeting card unless you've signed a form giving that permission to you. Similar rules apply if I sell some artwork that wasn't commissioned. Someone else might own the original, but only I can make prints and post a picture where I choose. Unless, that is, we have a contract that says otherwise.
- livefox 3y agoI had to make an account just to come in here to tell you you are not correct. Copyright is held automatically by the person who produces the work unless otherwise specified in a contract or agreement. I am a commission artist, and I retain all copyright to all of my work, per my terms of service, unless otherwise sold via agreement, and I charge extra for copyright. Someone can't commission me to paint something, and then turn around and sell prints of it themselves. I still did the work, and they need my approval before they can legally make money off of it. The reason why AI art is so devisive right now is because thousands of artists have had their work scraped and the AI trained on their work without their permission or compensation, and unlike a human who looks at other art for reference or inspiration, an AI can look at a dataset and pump out thousands of similar images in a very tiny amount of time. If the AI author or the user generating the image owns copyright, you can kiss artists selling their own work goodbye. The space will be flooded with "AI artists" who create work at a far faster pace than anything a real artist can create, for a fraction of the cost. The people who train AI on this art are profiteering off of the hard work of the people who spent years of their lives developing a skill.
- jprete 3y agoThis isn’t true; it’s entirely based on the contract. E.g. I believe wedding photographers usually make contracts to retain all copyrights. They either sell the couple prints of particular photos, or sell them a license to make more copies (which will cost more than the typical photo order).
- kmeisthax 3y agoBecause in the prompting case, the artist you commissioned isn't a human. Existing case law says you can't have non-humans holding copyright, because only humans can be creative, and copyright requires creativity. In the case of works for hire, the human artist is contributing creativity so the commissioner can steal[0] it for themselves. But with AI art, there's no creativity to steal, so there's no copyright. [0] My editorialization. The rationale of what is and isn't a work-for-hire was not some principled decision but just a list of whoever wasn't in the room when the last major copyright law was drafted.
- alasdair_ 3y ago> Existing case law says you can't have non-humans holding copyright, Most holders of copyright are non-human entities like Disney.
- _ea1k 3y agoIt is a complicated subject with no clear resolution, IMO. Train people on a bunch of books from a local library and noone has an issue. Train a generalized AI on the same thing, and the legal result should be the same. But what about an imaginary specialized AI that really just focuses on reproducing its input training material in a nearly verbatim way? The current reality is somewhere in between these two extremes, and defining the boundaries sounds difficult.
- soulofmischief 3y agoThat's not an AI, that's a database. The output should certainly not be copyrightable if it does not produce an existing copyrighted work or if fair use is in play, which is why many people seem to be attacking the training set itself, an argument which is also complicated but has little merit.
- _ea1k 3y agoSure, but the line between AI and a database can be blurred, even intentionally. Even with ChatGPT, it can be coerced to deliver parts of its training set nearly verbatim.
- SideQuark 3y agoNewer training techniques likely removed most of that by simply deduplicating training data. All the papers I read on verbatim techniques could only find items that were overpopulated during training.
- bayindirh 3y agoWhat if that output is created by mixing in copyrighted material? e.g.: What happens to your MIT licensed code when an AI assistant generates some code for you which contains some GPL, BUSL or Source Available licensed parts? Moreover, do these code bases scraped with consent of the owners?
- soulofmischief 3y ago
- NoZZz 3y agoI think the copyright of the training material should be propagated, and such a system can not be allowed to compete in the market without attributing and recompensating the authors. ;)
- kelseyfrog 3y agoThis should apply to human authorship as well.
- mistrial9 3y agothe four largest economies of the world have very different rules for this -- it is going to be settled today on a chat board?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoIt does. Plagiarism is a thing.
- kelseyfrog 3y agoNo, I mean any copywritable material that enters the human mind.
- freejazz 3y agoYou're kinda skipping past a whole lot to just equivocate that the human mind is comparable to an AI model
- kelseyfrog 3y agoIn every way that interacts with copyright, yes. In the ways that it doesn't interact with copyright, it's irrelevant.
- Magi604 3y agoWould be kind of funny if someone automated a bunch of ai bots to whip up and send tons of letters in support of their stance on this issue.
- jongjong 3y agoMy view is that if AI is trained on public data and it doesn't need to pay royalties for it, then it doesn't make sense that the public should pay royalties to use the AI's output. If AI companies paid royalties for their entire training set, then it would be a different situation. But given that it may be infeasible to prove or disprove whether or not AI was trained on public data, we should err on the side of caution and not allow the companies which build/operate AI to have copyrights over its output. A case could be made that most work which humans produce is itself derivative of various public works and therefore the AI is not so different from humans and therefore it should be given copyrights... But I think the key difference is that the AI is not human, there are 'human rights' but there are no 'AI rights' or 'machine rights'... Until an AI can prove that it has agency and that it works for its own interests and not for a third party, it should not have any rights.
- tanseydavid 3y agoYou seem to only be considering IP costs. To me, it seems that the bigger, on-going issue, is "Who will pay for the compute charges?" (which are not trivial)
- jongjong 3y agoI feel like it's companies' problem if their business model is not compatible with the new reality of AIs relentlessly scraping their data. They may need to rethink their business model and try to increase their margins and/or improve their efficiency to account for rising hosting costs. I guess there are difficult times ahead. I think it's not so bad since the entities who train and/or use AI also have to pay a lot of money on their end.
- Auracle 3y agoAlright - what if I take Stable Diffusion and further train it on my own art, and then use that to generate things? Or what if I don’t do that, but generate several images and spend hours making a composite? What if I start with my own photograph and generate things to use in a composite on top of that? It’s not so clear cut.
- robg 3y agoThese calls for public comment are really important to good government. If you or someone you know will be affected by the potential for new regulations, get the word out to leave comments. All are read, considered, and become part of the public record. Best if concerns and potential remedies are stated in a neutral tone. Write like you’re talking to someone at a government desk.
- 112233 3y agoCould someone help understand what is the difference between ml image generation and photography? Like, it seems that most arguments about one do trivially transfer to the other, so i am confuse
- some_random 3y agoI can't think of a single argument that trivially transfers between the two, could you elaborate?
- mensetmanusman 3y agoI think of LLM’s as a vast digital information landscape, vaguely analogous to walking through World of Warcraft, except at a higher dimensionality of existence. A photographer doesn’t create nature, the subjects, the architecture, the universe, the billions of R&D behind the silicon sensors, etc., but they create the situation and push the button. Creating the situation, I.e. drawing from the near infinite of possibilities, is analogous to prompting.
- some_random 3y agoPeople have enforced copyright over photos, the Eiffel tower's lights are copyrighted, some tattoo artists try to enforce copyright over their work, and I'm pretty sure you can't just take a photo of someone's painting and sell it. Any photo of a pine tree is the exclusive copyright of the photographer, nature can't enforce copyright. A photo of a pine tree generated from hundreds of copyrighted photos of pine trees is a completely different question, I think your argument is too reductive.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoYou can not take a photo of someone’s art or likeness and sell it in many cases (or if abuse etc.), this is true and should be true of LLMs. In this case the photography analogy holds. For the case of observing copyrighted photos (not directly storing indefinitely) and generalizing a pine tree from that data, I think that is fine: -assume we believe and rule it is not fine, then we will just allow huge companies to generate their own data sets and they will own this space moving forward (would require google maps levels of investment). Also, we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between illegal SD output versus clean FAANG output without extremely draconian measures.
- achow 3y agoI wish Patent office has similar attitude - not only for AI but for software patent in general.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThe Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress. The Patent and Trademark Office is part of the Department of Commerce. The US Congress decided to organize it that way, and would be responsible for reorganizing things. So call your Congressperson and make your argument.
- zb3 3y agoNo problem! > AI Not as useful as some people imagine, but still quite useful. > copyright Should be abolished completely, it doesn't benefit society.
- lubujackson 3y agoSomehow I think AI will contribute more comments on this than people, much like the net neutrality comment stuffing fiasco a while back. The reality is copyright has diverged so far from its intended purpose that there is no way to go back to the spirit of the law and rethink it because it is so fundamentally broken. So I anticipate some makeshift policy that nobody likes and gets broadly ignored because it is unenforceable. Honestly, the best approach right now might be to simply say that AI generated content needs to declare that it is AI generated (somehow...) - that would at least give some context to the situation so that actual rules could have an effect down the road.
- tayo42 3y agoThis is only going to have biased answers, because you would need to be passionate about ai content which is still a minority, to defend it. But there are a lot of uninformed people with opinions out there. If you stopped calling it AI, and called these things what they really are, tools that predict tokens or pixels there would be a little less fear. Emphasis on tools, you wouldn't create law that didnt allow google search to exist. People think these function calls are thinking and anthropomorphizing them. You wouldn't make content from photoshop not copyrightable.