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Copyright law cares about what generated the material, because it protects certain rights of the creator of the work, and if you can't point to a human creator

Copyright law cares about what generated the material, because it protects certain rights of the creator of the work, and if you can't point to a human creator whose rights were violated (a machine or program has no legal rights) then no one has any exclusive rights to that work, it's outside the scope of copyright law, it's effectively "uncopyrightable". These rights can be transferred from the author to a corporation, for example, in employment contract or law; but a corporation can't simply claim them if they never existed in the first place.

ertian 3y ago
This is kind of an interesting twist on a Turing test. If you can't tell by examining the work whether it was created by a human or an AI, then how can we say that a human is creative an an AI is not?
- kelseyfrog 3y ago
  Is this rhetorical? Authorial essentialism. This would be the belief that the text/words are imbued with a metaphysical attribute while the text is created that depends on the properties of the author. This is sort of the same umbrella belief that underpins the "words in the Bible are written by God" conclusion that some people have. I'm guessing that you and I both aren't authorial essentialists, but as for a way people could believe this, it's not a stretch of the imagination.
cmcaleer 3y ago
As it relates to computers though this seems incredibly messy and a bad interpretation. Is my python script copyrighted, but the bytecode (generated by a computer) not? How do compiled programs have any copyright protection? Am I only violating a computer's copyright (so no copyright) if I crack DRM on a generated executable file[1]? Does the DMCA anti-circumvention protection only apply to hand-applied protection? When is a computer doing too much of the work? What about a Blender render? I think it would take me a hot minute to do those raytracing computations by hand. Do I only get the copyright to the output if I do that? The most straightforward way to look at it is that computers and their programs are a tool, and their output as used by a person or person on behalf of a company. I think this current definition as I (NAL) understand it is unworkable and probably won't last long-term. [1] Say for the sake of argument that there's no images or models or things that are obviously copyrighted, it's just a CLI calculator
- PeterisP 3y ago
  The bytecode is not a novel creative work and does not have a separate copyright, this affects, for example, copyright terms (not that they are already relevant for code with the terms being so long) - the effective copyright date is when you wrote the source code, not when it was compiled; and of course the authorship - it does not matter who owns the machine or who initiated the compiling, only the writing of the original source code. But it is protected effectively as a "copy in a different format" of the original work - just as for a book, perhaps the author originally wrote as a manuscript with a quill on parchment or on a computer, and for the physical printed book it matters when and how the book was originally written (first 'fixed on a durable medium'), not what machines or tools were used in typesetting and printing the copy that you have - and the printed copy is still protected as a copy of that original creative work fixed in a manuscript. In essence, as far as copyright law is concerned, the bytecode isn't generated by a tool, it's transformed by a tool.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Processes that transform creative work do not add creativity, but also do not erase it. So both your Python files and anything in the __pycache__ dir are copyrighted. More specifically, the __pycache__ is the same work in a different form, so it's the same copyright. You couldn't, say, dedicate the source to the public domain and then claim copyright over the binaries. DMCA anti-circumention has to do with computer programs that enforce copyright. The work being protected has to be under copyright, but not the protection itself. The only reason why AI art is completely uncopyrightable is because the only human contribution is a text prompt which is too short and functional to be copyrighted. Even if you're getting creative with your prompt writing, none of that creativity translates over into the final art - you're just keyword stuffing a small language model.
kmeisthax 3y ago
This argument is backwards. George Carlin is a human, and he's the one whose rights were presumably violated. It's the creator of the fake George Carlin stand-up special's job to prove their behavior was legal. Saying that the AI George Carlin was human-written only means that, if creating your own George Carlin special is fair-use for some reason, then the human gets to claim copyright over that special. If it's AI then there's no copyright - at least, over the parts created by AI. Just to make things even more confusing, this also has nothing to do with the copyright on the training set data. If the AI you used had a 100% licensed training set, you still have to worry about how the AI's legally uncreative[0] contribution to the work dilutes your ownership of it. [0] As in, whether or not AI is creative, as a matter of law, it's not creative.

ertian 3y ago

This is kind of an interesting twist on a Turing test. If you can't tell by examining the work whether it was created by a human or an AI, then how can we say that a human is creative an an AI is not?

kelseyfrog 3y ago
Is this rhetorical? Authorial essentialism. This would be the belief that the text/words are imbued with a metaphysical attribute while the text is created that depends on the properties of the author. This is sort of the same umbrella belief that underpins the "words in the Bible are written by God" conclusion that some people have. I'm guessing that you and I both aren't authorial essentialists, but as for a way people could believe this, it's not a stretch of the imagination.

cmcaleer 3y ago

As it relates to computers though this seems incredibly messy and a bad interpretation. Is my python script copyrighted, but the bytecode (generated by a computer) not? How do compiled programs have any copyright protection? Am I only violating a computer's copyright (so no copyright) if I crack DRM on a generated executable file[1]? Does the DMCA anti-circumvention protection only apply to hand-applied protection? When is a computer doing too much of the work? What about a Blender render? I think it would take me a hot minute to do those raytracing computations by hand. Do I only get the copyright to the output if I do that? The most straightforward way to look at it is that computers and their programs are a tool, and their output as used by a person or person on behalf of a company. I think this current definition as I (NAL) understand it is unworkable and probably won't last long-term. [1] Say for the sake of argument that there's no images or models or things that are obviously copyrighted, it's just a CLI calculator

PeterisP 3y ago
The bytecode is not a novel creative work and does not have a separate copyright, this affects, for example, copyright terms (not that they are already relevant for code with the terms being so long) - the effective copyright date is when you wrote the source code, not when it was compiled; and of course the authorship - it does not matter who owns the machine or who initiated the compiling, only the writing of the original source code. But it is protected effectively as a "copy in a different format" of the original work - just as for a book, perhaps the author originally wrote as a manuscript with a quill on parchment or on a computer, and for the physical printed book it matters when and how the book was originally written (first 'fixed on a durable medium'), not what machines or tools were used in typesetting and printing the copy that you have - and the printed copy is still protected as a copy of that original creative work fixed in a manuscript. In essence, as far as copyright law is concerned, the bytecode isn't generated by a tool, it's transformed by a tool.
kmeisthax 3y ago
Processes that transform creative work do not add creativity, but also do not erase it. So both your Python files and anything in the __pycache__ dir are copyrighted. More specifically, the __pycache__ is the same work in a different form, so it's the same copyright. You couldn't, say, dedicate the source to the public domain and then claim copyright over the binaries. DMCA anti-circumention has to do with computer programs that enforce copyright. The work being protected has to be under copyright, but not the protection itself. The only reason why AI art is completely uncopyrightable is because the only human contribution is a text prompt which is too short and functional to be copyrighted. Even if you're getting creative with your prompt writing, none of that creativity translates over into the final art - you're just keyword stuffing a small language model.

kmeisthax 3y ago

This argument is backwards. George Carlin is a human, and he's the one whose rights were presumably violated. It's the creator of the fake George Carlin stand-up special's job to prove their behavior was legal. Saying that the AI George Carlin was human-written only means that, if creating your own George Carlin special is fair-use for some reason, then the human gets to claim copyright over that special. If it's AI then there's no copyright - at least, over the parts created by AI. Just to make things even more confusing, this also has nothing to do with the copyright on the training set data. If the AI you used had a 100% licensed training set, you still have to worry about how the AI's legally uncreative[0] contribution to the work dilutes your ownership of it. [0] As in, whether or not AI is creative, as a matter of law, it's not creative.