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This is addressed in TFA: > The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and th

This is addressed in TFA: > The Board finds that the Work contains more than a de minimis amount of content generated by artificial intelligence (“AI”), and this content must therefore be disclaimed in an application for registration. The human-authored portion of the work would be copyrightable if the author disclaimed the portions that were created by an LLM.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago
Does this mean that if I use an even more deterministic tool like, say, autocomplete to write software, that bit (say an auto-generated function definition), doesn't attract copyright? Not that it doesn't make sense to say what they did, but it seems not quite compatible with how copyright already seems to work in practice. Which is, instead another demonstration that copyright in general is a pretty internally-inconsistent system when it comes to the details.
- dahfizz 3y ago
  I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I think its pretty easy to argue that generated boiler plate constitutes a "de minimis" amount of content and so you would still own the copyright of all the code
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Hm. I could see an argument for something less deterministic being less copyrightable.
- neltnerb 3y ago
  If the autocompleted part were copyrighted, why would you be able to use it freely? What claim to you have to authorship? Did you, perhaps, write the stuff that the autocomplete used as context to give you a selection of choices to make about what to put there? Because that still sounds like a human making choices about things to me. This is a vaguely recognizable metaphor for prompt engineering, but I think you're orders of magnitude off in estimating the ratio of human choice to computer extrapolation. Sure, a compiler or something maybe is a better metaphor, but even then the concept, the source material is generated by a human. You could say that a prompt is source material and the generator is just a compiler analogy, but I think they made the only choice they could here. Otherwise you can use a generator to make literally a billion images, copyright them all (including aspects you did not make a choice to add, like details on people in the background there), and control art for the rest of time.

adhesive_wombat 3y ago

Does this mean that if I use an even more deterministic tool like, say, autocomplete to write software, that bit (say an auto-generated function definition), doesn't attract copyright? Not that it doesn't make sense to say what they did, but it seems not quite compatible with how copyright already seems to work in practice. Which is, instead another demonstration that copyright in general is a pretty internally-inconsistent system when it comes to the details.

dahfizz 3y ago
I'm not a copyright lawyer, but I think its pretty easy to argue that generated boiler plate constitutes a "de minimis" amount of content and so you would still own the copyright of all the code
nonethewiser 3y ago
Hm. I could see an argument for something less deterministic being less copyrightable.
neltnerb 3y ago
If the autocompleted part were copyrighted, why would you be able to use it freely? What claim to you have to authorship? Did you, perhaps, write the stuff that the autocomplete used as context to give you a selection of choices to make about what to put there? Because that still sounds like a human making choices about things to me. This is a vaguely recognizable metaphor for prompt engineering, but I think you're orders of magnitude off in estimating the ratio of human choice to computer extrapolation. Sure, a compiler or something maybe is a better metaphor, but even then the concept, the source material is generated by a human. You could say that a prompt is source material and the generator is just a compiler analogy, but I think they made the only choice they could here. Otherwise you can use a generator to make literally a billion images, copyright them all (including aspects you did not make a choice to add, like details on people in the background there), and control art for the rest of time.